The story of the life and creative journey of rock ‘n’ roll king Elvis Presley through the prism of his complicated relationship with his odious manager, Colonel Tom Parker. They worked together for more than 20 years: from the beginning of Elvis’ career to his unprecedented fame.
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Baz Luhrmann is a surprisingly underrated director: he is criticized for his frivolity, kitschiness, inappropriate soundtrack and garishness; he is really bad at heavyweight drama (even the duet of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, who are probably the most famous Australians in the industry, could not save “Australia”), but when it comes to carnival, he is unrivaled. He has a knack for boogie dancing on bones and feasting during the plague like no other, his characters, whether they are lovers from a Shakespearean tragedy, a cabaret star dying of tuberculosis or a rich man from the American classics, always go down, but always in style and glamour. Elvis’s story is no secret to anyone, but the pomp with which he rides to his sad end is astounding. The gold, diamonds and Las Vegas signs dazzle the eye from the very first frame, the characters parade around in vivid images from successive decades, and the music doesn’t stop for nearly a minute. Luhrmann still flirts with the anachronistic soundtrack, but this time he does it much more gracefully than in The Great Gatsby: the modern tracks either somehow quote the tunes of that era or are even covers of Presley’s hits. Split screen, parallel editing, pseudo newsreel – everything is used to keep the show moving even for a moment. Butler is a phenomenal, his body language, his facial expressions, his utterly wonderful charisma in the frame – you literally cannot take your eyes off of him. Luhrmann does not hesitate to focus on Butler’s hips, vividly demonstrating why the singer was nicknamed “Elvis the Pelvis” in his time. The story is largely seen through the eyes of Tom Hanks’ character, the unclean impresario Colonel, and the role is a perfect illustration of the actor’s universal charm, which allows him to play both good-natured romantics and slippery types, who are better to stay away from. That said, the Colonel is the film’s main trouble: Luhrmann is completely out of measure with the voice-over narration on his behalf, he cheapens the film to an insulting degree and constantly shifts the focus of the story to trivial comments by an old man with one foot in the grave. Nevertheless, Butler and Hanks work superbly as a pair, and it’s the dynamic in their duet that distinguishes Luhrmann’s film from any biopic about a rock star in recent years.
The Australian has unlocked the secret of film biography that had been on the surface all along: a good biopic is not an attempt to remove the wax mask from the face of real people, it is always a metaphor: sometimes of overcoming, sometimes of the unbearable weight of talent, more often of the predatory world around. Luhrmann does not so much need a specific Elvis Presley as an abstract figure of a king who has been danced to death by his entourage. There could scarcely have been a better time for a story like this to come out: just under a year ago, the world was watching Britney Spears’ custody case by her father’s manager, horrified at the number of pills she was forced to take, cringing at the intimate details like the ban on marriage and childbirth, asking what kind of system this is that takes control over people’s own lives – audiences today are not only and not so much interested in the show itself as in the cost of it. Luhrmann’s “Elvis” digs into the co-dependent relationship between creator and manager, where one can’t do without the other, and the other is necessarily the villain, as if there could be no other future for such a partnership. It is this transcending of a particular personality that allowed the film to find its own face and voice and spared Austin Butler, preventing him from becoming a contestant on “One in One,” but providing almost unlimited scope for the interpretation of the famous image. The talent-practice dichotomy is a necessary component of any creative duo, every Elvis needs his Colonel, every Wozniak needs his Jobs. This plot will never get old, just as the question “who’s to blame and what to do about all this mess now?” will always be relevant. Luhrmann paints his Colonel as an unambiguous antagonist, leaving some room for thought, showing Elvis’s total financial illiteracy, his blind, almost indifferent credulity and weakness for drugs; there is also room for a greedy father (what without parents getting rich on their children) – a whole pantheon of vices, you name it. For all the relative abstraction of the story, Luhrmann’s final touch is a tribute to a real man, his joys and sorrows: the final two or three minutes are a slicing of documentary footage of Elvis, partly repeating scenes from the film, as a reminder that behind every metaphor is someone’s broken life.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (60.6 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10+
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish.
