With electrifying performances from Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, Baz Luhrmann’s whirlwind biopic is cinematic dynamite
From an opening that cheekily evokes the dropped snow globe of Citizen Kane to an Unchained Melody finale that had me crying in the chapel, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a turned-up-to-11 treat. This blistering pop biopic combines the kinetic musical madness of Moulin Rouge! with the turbo-charged irreverence of The Great Gatsby, the Shakespearian tragedy of Romeo+Juliet (with an added touch of Falstaff and Prince Hal) and the “what-all-of-it!?” ambition of Australia. It’s a riotously audacious work, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the king of rock’n’roll and his puppet-master promoter, the latter of whom narrates the story (like Salieri in Amadeus) and who tells his money-spinning client: “We are the same, you and I – two odd, lonely children, reaching for eternity.”
“Without me there would be no Elvis Presley,” drawls Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker (aka Dutchman Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), a “snowman” or carnival huckster who does his deals on a Ferris wheel and who sounds genuinely amazed that “there are some who make me out to be the villain of this story!” Most will share that view as the curtain comes down on this whirlwind chronicle of a career from which Parker took 50% of the profits and 100% of the control. Yet for all his monstrousness, Hanks’s prosthetically enhanced antihero has just enough wheedling pathos to make us understand how he wormed his way into Elvis’s confidence. With a sing-song voice that is part Elmer Fudd, part Lugosi’s Dracula, we watch him usurp first Elvis’s much-mourned mother, Gladys, and then his idolised wife, Priscilla, in the inner circle of trust, casting himself as Presley’s closest confidant and making him a star even while strangling his artistic ambition.
