Director Baz Luhrmann presents his vision of Elvis Presley carried by a dazzling Austin Butler.
Far from being a biographical film like any other, Elvis infuses Baz Luhrmann with all the extravagance, grace, excess and hyperbole that are the originality of Moulin Rouge!, Gatsby and now this Elvis. Because only the Australian is able to split the screen two, then three, then eight, insert comic sequences, surtitles and even a postcard without breaking the rhythm of this fluid 159-minute feature film.
The film has two voices. That, sometimes off-screen, of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, perfect cynicism) and that of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler, hallucinating truth worthy of an Oscar nomination), the two men who in turn tell us the king’s story .
Elvis is the king, the king, especially the kid who discovers the power of music by watching black people dance in the slums of his hometown and sing in church. Music is sexual and spiritual ecstasy for Elvis because, as his mother (Helen Thomson) keeps telling him, it’s a gift from God. Then Elvis is the king, the young man who makes “black music” and sways on stage, then adorned by the media with the worst epithets – “wild”, “perverted”, “Elvis the cymbal” -, because dangerous for the “establishment” of the post-war period. Elvis shocks, detonates, provokes the hysteria of admirers, liberates.
And finally, Elvis the King becomes the king of Las Vegas, exhausted, bloated, alcoholic, addicted to pills, who leaves Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) exhausted from such a life. For Parker, a former student of Barnum’s, adopts the formula of “The Greatest Show on Earth” (“The Greatest Show in the World”) to push his filly ever further, making first a beast out of a fair, then a one Beast of the stage but still a beast of burden that he manipulates to collect 50% of his earnings.
In addition, Baz Luhrmann constantly places Presley in its historical context, segregation, the assassination of Martin Luther King, then Robert Kennedy, the beginnings of the hippie movement, social protests … Elvis the rebel, overwhelmed by his fate, incessantly searching the love of the audience, a tremendous love that feeds it as much as it kills it. The unbridled musical epic “Elvis” glues the star’s fate to America’s, Luhrmann sends us back to our demons, to Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and all who were sacrificed on the altar of fame, money and profit.
Austin Butler is inhabited – owned? – through this role in which he pours his whole soul. And when Elvis/Austin sings for the last time in Las Vegas, his face bloated and streaming with sweat, we feel choked up at that special feeling of late. There is no doubt that only Baz Luhrmann could pay such vivid homage to the one who will always be king.