Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Review

More is always more, with the Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, Hollywood's specialist in operatic bombast ( Romeo + Juliet , Moulin Rouge! ). And so the camera also zooms in generously on young Elvis Presley's purple satin-wrapped crotch, as his jerking hips unleash an unexpected sensation in the women in the audience.

They spring up as if in a trance: trembling and their eyes wide, as if their sexual liberation starts exactly there: at the first tones of Baby Let's Play House . Initiated by the handsome lad with a quiff, patent leather shoe and eyeshadow, who just now appeared a bit nervous on stage, unaware of his effect on the upcoming Elvis fans.

Gospel

Whether it was exactly that way during the singer's baptism of fire at the Hayride music night in 1954, where country audiences were introduced to orgasmic rock that night – I'm not sure. Rarely (if ever) has an imitation Elvis looked so electric and infectious as actor Austin Butler's in Elvis .

With his 159-minute film biography, Luhrmann does not seem to want to shatter the myth of Elvis – that myth should on the contrary be enlarged. And is served in exuberantly stylized, video clip-like scenes. Elvis as a kid in Mississippi, peeking through a crack in a liquor store, where blues singer and guitarist Big Boy Crudup is just playing a deliciously filthy version of his That's Allright Mama . And how the camera immediately shoots to the gospel service in a field tent, after which both black music styles first enter into a musical duel, to merge in Elvis' head. The holy spirit has entered him, the priest points out. Insightful, exciting and funny.

That jumpy, lavish narrative form, in which there is hardly any room for a full-fledged dramatic scene, sometimes makes Elvis exhausting. Although Luhrmann does add structure, in the form of the narrator: Elvis shadowy manager Colonel Tom Parker, the alias of Andreas 'Dries' van Kuijk, who grew up in Breda and moved to America. 'Without me there would be no Elvis', he says to the viewer. "And yet there are people who think I'm the villain." The Colonel, who set everything for Elvis, tied the artist to an endless series of hotel gigs in Las Vegas, possibly to fund his own gambling addiction. And in the run-up to his tragic toilet death in 1977, he kept his source of income going with injections from a private doctor.

As a Disney-esque villain, that's how Tom Hanks plays him. The actor's mimicry is hindered by a chin and nose prosthesis, the silly accent strongly accentuated, never even close to the Colonel's wooden Dutch-English.

Cartoonish

Elvis let his manager direct his life completely. But what exactly happened between the two remains unclear here. Elvis' character is too fleeting for that. And Hanks' Colonel too cartoonish. The film draws heavily on Elvis's delightfully imagined comeback performances to tell the complete Elvis saga. But towards the end, the curtain closes: the viewer is spared the truly humiliating, bloated, gorging Elvis. It is palpable that Luhrmann takes the Presley heirs into account; Even when the adulterous and pill-swallowing Elvis goes through a relational valley, he still expresses his great love for his wife Priscilla.

Elvis' indebtedness to black music is emphatically intertwined by Elvis : in addition to Crudup, Sister Rosetta, BB King, Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton pass by. The fact that they did not get the same opportunities in segregated America is also emphasized by Luhrmann through the Colonel, who immediately sees Elvis's potential marketing success when he hears the singer on the radio: ' He's white?! †