Elvis (2022)

PG-13, but for some reason, it feels R.  I don't know why.  I'm trying to think of specific moments.  I think a lot of it has to do with the cruelty that the movie exposes often.  There is drug use and alcohol use.  There's some language.  Oh, I know why it feels R but isn't!  It completely downplays the fact that Elvis Presley seduced a teenager and married her.  Yeah, the whole statuatory rape bit is part of the movie.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Baz Luhrmann

I don't know if I can write this one, guys.  I just finished lambasting Kevin Smith in Clerks III.  But even with Kevin Smith, he's a guy I like despite the fact that he often makes bad movies.  Baz Luhrmann is on another level bad.  And most of my critique of the movie is that I can't stand Baz Luhrmann after my brain clicked into adulthood and realized that Moulin Rouge! is not a good movie. Like, I don't want this kind of hate in my heart.  

"Hate" is such a strong word.  This isn't the worst movie.  It's a bad movie that makes a lot of unforgivable choices.  But I'm also just tired of the Academy Awards constantly making music biopics Oscar noms. These movies are so Oscar bait-y that I feel like I'm watching the same movie over-and-over again.  I mean, didn't I just go through with this with Bohemian Rhapsody?  We get it.  The world of Rock 'n Roll is fraught with abuse and drug use.  Rock stars used to be real people with real dreams until someone takes advantage of them and then they collapse. They may have a moment of glory right before the end so you can keep enjoying their music. But ultimately, the system beats them down and that's the movie.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  The biopic might be the most superficial formula of all the movies because they're based on true stories.  We think that just because the same story happened to multiple people, that makes it a new story.  It's not a new story.  It's all variations of a theme.  But Elvis has the extra crime of being almost 2 hours and 40 minutes.  That's too much.  Heck, with all of that time, Baz Luhrmann didn't even have Nixon in it.  

Honestly, the best biopics aren't about a performer's entire life.  It should be focused on one moment in time.  (With the exception of Spencer.  That was too intense.  But for every rule, there must be the exception.)  What if this was just about Elvis deciding to play the music he wanted to play that got him into the war?  That is a great moment.  It's the Elvis that the movie wanted to communicate.  It's the guy who cared more about the music than what his producer wanted.  It's this fantastic climax to a story that had built up in the course of the whole movie.  We could have avoided the Priscilla stuff that is super toxic.  It would have left Elvis off on a high note.  We could have the memory of the King of Rock and Roll actually as someone who wasn't selling out.  Instead, we make it all about Colonel Tom Parker. 

We need to talk about Colonel Tom Parker in this movie. This might be the first time that I have something negative to say about Tom Hanks because (shy of any new news I hear about parenting style) he is a national treasure.  The following are things that I completely understand.  1) Tom Hanks is a great actor (kind of. Sorry, he plays a lot of the same roles and those roles are great.)  2)Tom Hanks really likes music and making music movies.  3) This is a challenge for Tom Hanks.  Okay, that's out there.  We got it?  How about, instead of having Tom Hanks poorly pretend to be a 300 lb Dutch man, we get a 300 lb Dutch man?  There's never a moment in the movie where I'm watching Colonel Tom Parker and think, "That's not Tom Hanks in a fat suit doing a really bad accent."  The worst part is that the movie is more of an expose of Colonel Tom Parker than it is a character analysis of Elvis.  We get who Elvis is because of the actions that Col. Parker does. Sure, that's good storytelling.  I don't hate the approach at all.  It's just that the performance there needs to be so compelling that it makes us focus on Elvis.  Nope.  The entire time, "Tom Hanks is doing a bad accent in a fat suit and I don't know why".  Also, say "Snowman" one more time.  Stop it.  I get it.  "Snowman".  It's his thing.  But it never works and it just gets more annoying as the movie goes on.

But so much goes to Baz Luhrmann.  As I indicated earlier, I thought that Baz Luhrmann was a genius for so long in my adolescence.  Man alive, it was embarrassing how much I recommended Moulin Rouge! to people.  (Secret: I still kind of want to see the stage production.  Maybe I'm a masochist.  Maybe I want justification for my love of the movie years ago.)  Then I started watching Luhrmann's other works and I realized that his entire thing is just overwhelming the senses.  Now, some people might just argue auteur theory at me.  I mean, by Kubrick's definition of auteur theory, I am able to recognize all of Luhrmann's works without having to see his name attached to the credits. Maybe not Australia.  That movie is just bad and boring.   But Luhrmann's entire thing is overload.  He doesn't really let you just sit there.  With Moulin Rouge!, I feel like he gets a lot of his system in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.  HIs chaos, while technically throughout the film, is in its most intense in the first few minutes of the movie.

Elvis, I suppose, shares some of the same DNA of Moulin Rouge!.  But he's applying this philosophy for the true story of a real man when he's covering his whole life.  It creates a really weird effect like you are just watching an almost three hour montage sequence.  Insteading of letting any one moment in the movie breathe, it becomes about flashy images and instant takeaway.  If this is meant to be a breakdown of what made Elvis who he is, there's a certain element of the movie wanting to keep you away from who he was as a human being.  Sure, Austin Butler said he got music from his childhood.  Sure, we saw flashes of young Elvis spy on Black gospel liturgies in awe.  But that never became a real moment. I'm going to jump to an example of this idea done better and it also coincidentally has Elvis Presley.  (Is it really coincidence, or did my mind just make an association with Elvis Presley and that example was a good one?)  Forrest Gump, as little as I like that movie, tells the epic story of one man.  But imagine that the scene where young Forrest seeing Elvis practicing his dancing affected everything he did in the movie based on two seconds of footage.  Every time that Elvis did anything with the Black community, it flashed to those two seconds of film to justify every one of his choices.

I also am really skeeved out by the takeaway that this movie wants me to have.  Not more than the Priscilla stuff.  That stuff straight up grosses me out.  I'm talking about Elvis's legacy on music history. One thing that music history has been very clear on is that Elvis Presley was successful as a performer because he took Black music and did it as a White man.  It's a commentary on race and prejudice, that White culture can't actually handle authentic voices.  Now, I won't put all of this onus on Elvis.  Elvis was raised, to my understanding, alongside Black children. It's natural that he embraced the music.  But the movie never really calls out White America or Colonel Tom Parker for the cultural appropriation that this movie is screaming all throughout.  It almost deifies Elvis saying that he did the right thing.  Yes, many of us listen to Black artists today.  (I feel very uncomfortable saying "everyone".) But it's not because of Elvis.  White people kept going to Elvis concerts because it was mentally safer for them to hear this music coming out of a White boy's face.  I don't think that Elvis was this bastion against conservatism. Sure, people thought that his gyrations were lewd.  Those very same people hated Black people.  I don't know if Elvis was really this great hero in the narrative of Civil Rights Movement that the movie almost claims that he is.  

This movie annoyed me.  My wife loved the first hour of it and then even admitted that the movie really just went way too long.  Yeah, I'm sick of biopics.  I'm more sick of music biopics.  But Elvis even outdoes other music biopics in terms of getting on my nerves.