Austin Butler
Elvis (2022)
A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!
Those propulsive, unfathomable syllables are the bang-up opening to Little Richard’s 1955 rock ’n’ roll classic “Tutti Frutti”, his first big hit. Wordlessly, unforgettably, they put us in the hands of a master. In Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic Elvis (with Austin Butler in the title role, in a star-making performance) the King of Rock ’n’ Roll doesn’t even attempt to sing that rowdy song with its percussive jump start.
But we do see how that firecracker Little Richard fed the flame inside Elvis. On a night out in Club Handy on Memphis’ Beale Street, Elvis watches, transfixed, as Richard (Alton Mason) thrillingly jams on “Tutti Frutti” and the crowd goes wild.
In Mason’s buoyant, unruly performance, just like the real Richard’s, he simultaneously wails and pounds the piano, at one point propping his leg on top of it. Elvis, seeing Richard, his hair upswept and brilliantined, cutting loose, is both transfixed and envious. He wants to perform like that, without constraint, not bound by rules or expectations.
Dropping in at Club Handy is something of a ritual for the wide-eyed Elvis, an ambitious young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi. He can mingle with Black musicians who inspire him. In the nightspot we hear seminal singers like B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharp (Yola Quartey) and Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) pour out sounds that nourish Elvis’s soul.
He first saw how musical rhythms could shake up a gathering as a youngster inveigling his way into Black church services and tent revivals. The boy would join the “saints” in their fervent singing and dancing in praise of the Lord. Those intense gospel experiences would later lead to an indebtedness, and a lifelong connection, to Mahalia Jackson. And later in the movie we see him famously stand next to Fats Domino and declare that Fats, not Elvis, is the true “King” of rock ’n’ roll.
The young white Southerner’s all but helpless embrace of Black music is folded into Elvis for sound reasons. To his immense credit, Luhrmann has done his research. Here’s a revealing interview he conducted with Sam Bell, a Black childhood friend of Elvis’s (24:51. The poorly done subtitles can be hard to follow):
And here’s a taped segment explaining how Elvis was received and respected in the Black music community (14:29. B.B. King is especially informative):
Churches, nightclubs and roadhouses all went into forming Elvis’s musical signature. That early enchantment helps explain how this smiling, good-looking, affable country kid broke through to an uptight nation and dared its frozen citizenry to let go, get up and move.
It got him into trouble. The movie shows how legions of white politicians, government officials and police departments wanted to jail Presley, shut him down for his “obscene” public performances.
The man certainly made provocative moves. Those dangerously swiveling hips and forward-thrusting thighs were wholly unexpected from a white pop artist. His voice could be growly and rebellious, or tender and playful. Or, on some songs, he could toss all those competing tendencies together. His singing startlingly blended rhythm and blues, gospel and rock ’n’ roll ruckus.
Would that Luhrmann and his co-screenwriters Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner had focused most intently on dramatizing that musical audacity, obviously without stinting on the singer’s self-delusions, drug abuse and the family dissolution that ended up strangling Elvis and bringing him to a sad premature end in 1977 at age 42.
Instead, they’ve made our storyteller the infamous Colonel Tom Parker, a Dutchman who arrived in the U.S. at 19 under a cloud (he may have been involved in a murder in The Netherlands), eventually working as a carny and shadily managing a handful of country music acts. Parker intuitively grasped that Presley, in confounding racial barriers, could become a cultural phenomenon, to say nothing of a huge cash cow.
Latching on to the sensitive young man – who didn’t know much about business – Parker solely managed Presley’s entire career. The wheeler-dealer eventually commanded 50% of the singer’s income, and kept him confined to appearances in the U.S., most notably long, enormously profitable, runs in the early ’70s at Las Vegas’ International Hotel.
This performing drudgery, along with Elvis’ highly profitable, if totally undistinguished, movie career, made both men super rich. But Presley spent lavishly and remained in debt to Parker right up until he died.
Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) managing his superstar client (Austin Butler) in Elvis
I can’t fathom why Luhrmann and his fellow writers decided to let Parker provide the only voiceover narration we hear for the movie’s entire 2 hours and 35 minutes. This corrupt, manipulative Svengali, played by Hanks with an indeterminate Dutch-Southern accent, occupies too much of the movie’s time and sensibility. My guess is he has more lines and screen time than Elvis. And Hanks chews the Colonel’s sliminess as if it were delectably seasoned barbecue.
With Elvis’s every move toward independence, Parker is there to tell us it won’t last. When Parker has confined Elvis to a mainstream, straitjacket playbook, the young upstart recovers his rebel image in a concert by singing “Evil”, driving the crowd to rapture. We hear Parker on the soundtrack prophesying doom.
When Elvis commandeers a bland TV Christmas special and goes way off script by donning a full black leather outfit and singing his bad-boy hits like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blue Suede Shoes”, Parker’s face and voice warn that middle-America’s rigid conformity won’t be overthrown, and Elvis’s appeal to subversive elements will backfire.
Why not, in recounting Elvis’s travails, let others speak in voiceover? We wonder how Elvis’s father Vernon (Richard Roxburgh, in a restrained, affecting performance) felt about his son’s rise and Parker’s steering of it. We see Vernon, nominally Elvis’s business manager, bend to Parker’s will, but it could have been piercing to hear him explain his capitulation in voiceover.
What about Elvis’s wife Priscilla (Olivia De Jonge, who makes a few lovely, far too brief, appearances)? She never gets a chance to tell us what she thinks of the volatile, talented man she loves and how their marriage went off track.
Finally, of course, there’s Elvis himself. What a refreshing break from the classic movie bio it might have been if Elvis, surely blind to many toxic elements of his own story, had been able to reveal to us what he told himself about his life. We never hear him speak for himself on the soundtrack.
Instead, fleeting “insights” are crammed unconvincingly into dialogue where Elvis tells others how he loves Black music, feels misunderstood, only wants the best for his family, and wishes he could sing without compromise. But these are plaints we’re already familiar with. In this script, we learn nothing we didn’t already know about Elvis from Elvis. From the grave Colonel Parker seems to have conned the scriptwriters along with everyone else.
Baz Luhrmann directing Austin Butler in Elvis
Still, Luhrmann the director knows how to put on a dazzling visual show. A rotating Ferris wheel suddenly turns into a spinning .45 record on a turntable, and Elvis is off to start a new life in Memphis. When Elvis has run out of movies to make, the run-down HOLLYWOOD sign turns into the word TELEVISION, and a bright NBC peacock is perched on top of it.
And we actually get to see Elvis as a sharp musician when, in rehearsal, he blends all the instruments, including guitars, trombones and drums, into a potent, throbbing 30-piece arrangement for his rendition of “That’s All Right, Baby”, a beloved song he first picked up in honky-tonks. It’s a beautifully rendered moment, seeing Elvis in control, not floundering; an artist, not a victim.
Also, most importantly, there’s no denying that despite being hamstrung by the script’s awkwardness, Butler provides an unparalleled re-creation of a superstar’s native, uncorrupted performing drives. Butler is far more innocently, invitingly lewd than Rami Malek was as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). And he’s both moodily slicker and more irrepressible even than Taron Egerton’s expert, jumping-jack Elton John in Rocketman (2019).
In fairness, Elvis’s moves are far more recognizable, more memorable than either of those two singers’ on-stage cavorting. Nearly everyone, male or female (cultural vigilantes excepted), wanted Elvis to get away with moving the way he did. It was gratifying to watch Elvis gyrate – he wasn’t really a dancer – while ladling honey with his dreamy, boy-down-the-street, never too deeply smutty, vocalizing.
Butler steps into Elvis’s performing zone – the nice kid who’s sometimes maybe not so nice – as snugly as he wiggles into his leather pants. Butler is so physically open and daring that it becomes up to you as you watch those Greco-Roman proportioned lips and that lanky, lissome body to decide where this actor might go and how far you might care to go with him. I think he may be a new kind of star. Even with his hypnotic blue eyes, he doesn’t try to be brazenly enticing, nor does vanity mislead him into playing hard to get. Which is not unlike Elvis. Whatever he’s doing, you’d swear the boy can’t help it.