Vegas baby, Vegas! Here’s our review of this must-see movie. We also asked our resident DJ ‘Disco Dave’ to create his Spotify tribute to the KING — you can find that here.
Hell for leather: Austin Butler as the young Elvis Presley
A well'a bless my soul
What'sa wrong with me?
I'm itchin' like a man in a fuzzy tree
My friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug
I'm in love
I'm all shook up
Baz Luhrmann can’t resist spectacle — and Austin Butler does a good impression of the King’s dirty smirk and sultry Memphis drawl in this film that will leave you, eventually, all shook up. It goes without saying that the best part of Baz Luhrmann’s long, busy, sometimes annoying, sometimes brilliant biopic of Elvis Presley is the Vegas years.
The film is in part a visual metaphor for ‘what happens in Vegas’, except Baz doesn’t let it stay secret in Vegas, as, with his trademark dash, he reveals all the sin city has to offer, some bad and some good, to a thudding over-the-top-score of Elvis songs. This director was never going to reach Vegas and discover the merits of moderation. In this tempting revelation he was always going to go predictably wild and he did. Lurid, languid Luhrmann’s lavish look with glitter, sequins, pearls, moonlight and gilded elephants abounds.
Remember Nicole Kidman lowered on a trapeze through a cloud of diamonds in Moulin Rouge? Or Leonardo DiCaprio toasted with champagne, fireworks and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in The Great Gatsby? What Luhrmann can do is entrance. That basically is the plot of Elvis. Over some three hours, Presley keeps making an entrance and getting reintroduced to us in a different package devised by Colonel Tom Parker the tour manager (Tom Hanks). At first, the bland, all-American boy, then the rock’n’roll, hip-gyrating lad we know and love so well, but also the 1968 comeback Christmas specialist where the colonel dresses him in a Christmas sweater and tells him to sing Here Comes Santa Claus, but guess what? Presley turns up in black leather and belts out Blue Suede Shoes.
Like all of Luhrmann’s films, if you’re wallowing in the spectacle of it all but actively listening somewhere in the middle you will notice a pivot point. In a scene bursting with the director’s cinematic tricks of the trade, as Elvis first appears and hysterical teenagers throw bits of themselves on stage, the Colonel, with a gleam in this old seedy carnival showman’s eye notes, “She was having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” and in awe of Elvis “the greatest carnival attraction I had ever seen”. Obviously, Sam Phillip’s discovery of Presley’s music is important, however, more to Luhrmann’s point, is to ask can we still enjoy the flashy steps and thrusting hips of an Elvis package excitingly exploited by the Colonel or indeed the director himself, for our carnival pleasure.
Then when this show finally hits Vegas, the Colonel books Presley into the International Hotel by conning him to believe there is a global tour coming up. Think Tui ad ‘Yeah right’. Elvis is caught in a trap and he can’t walk out imprisoned by the showbiz that recreated him, yet again, his show must go on, warts, flab, stimulants, girls, and all for at least four years while the Colonel scalps him to pay off his gambling debts. Butler excels here with some truly superb acting of an Elvis free-falling song after song to the very bottom of his famous life. As expected, Luhrmann now focuses in tightly on the drug-addled self-parody of himself Elvis became in the end as he fights ferociously to retain some shred of dignity before he leaves the building.
So, pass the popcorn, mind the sequins, I’m not up for cancelling the King yet. I’m all shook up and off to watch it again. And anyway, who knows, Elvis might just make a comeback at Mar-a-Lago next summer!