Review: Elvis

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis" is less of a rock star biopic and more in line with - oddly enough - Milos Forman's "Amadeus," which chronicled the story of Salieri, the man who - according to the movie - accepted some form of responsibility for the titular musical genius' death. In "Elvis," the Salieri character is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, playing against type as a villain and seemingly having fun hamming it up a little), the king of rock 'n roll's manager.

Similar to Eugene Landy, the psychiatrist/manager portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the Brian Wilson biopic "Love and Mercy," Parker is a manipulator who takes control of his talent's financial affairs and basically runs him into the ground physically in pursuit of more money - in this case, Parker has a gambling addiction.

Luhrmann deploys many of his usual cinematic tricks here - his films are flashy and exuberant, and "Elvis" has some a lot of stylish flair to rank with some of his best movies - namely, "Moulin Rouge" and "Strictly Ballroom" - while also exhibiting some of the more over-the-top elements of some of his lesser features, such as his remake of "The Great Gatsby."

But what holds the film together is, surprisingly, not Hanks - a great actor who gets to have some fun here overplaying the sleazy Colonel, a Dutch immigrant who somehow has people convinced that he grew up in West Virginia and whose penchant for "snowing" people at first impresses Elvis - but Austin Butler who brings Presley to life in ways that I found fairly surprising.

In many ways, "Elvis" takes the routine task of portraying the rise-and-fall epic of a musician - so, we get the rise to stardom; the scenes where Elvis doesn't listen to his wise mother, who warns him about the Colonel; the drug abuse; the divorce from the spouse, etc. - but there's a lot of fun to be had with the combination of stock footage mixing with recreated scenes from Elvis' career, and the live performance sequences are pretty impressive.

The film is, perhaps, a little too generous in how it depicts Elvis paying homage to the Black musicians whose musical styles he adopted for his own music. In other words, I don't think he did nearly so much as the film depicts him doing behind the scenes. The manner to which he was manipulated by his manager, on the other hand, as well as his harrowing descent into a pills addiction, felt pretty authentic.

"Elvis" isn't a great saga depicting a musical icon - some of the best of the past few decades include the brilliant Bob Dylan phantasmagoria "I'm Not There" and "Straight Outta Compton." That being said, it's still pretty fun, even when Luhrmann can't quite get over his trademark obsessions - seriously, what was with the scenes in which modern music played during scenes in the 1950s? The film is at times - to quote an Elvis song - too much, but it's often engaging, stylish and entertaining enough to warrant a recommendation.