20 years ago Baz Luhrmann shat Moulin Rouge upon us. He hasn’t been honing his skills in the lean years, as his Elvis makes Moulin Rouge look like a masterpiece.
But why review a film when you can review a critic? The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane attempts to bait us into reading his drivel:
Baz Luhrmann’s film, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, shows a revolutionary musician being absorbed into the mainstream, but does it critique that process or continue it?
This reviewer, a non-player character who may appear smart thanks to his 80,000-word vocabulary module, seems concerned that Elvis may not be portrayed as enough of a sellout. His answer? I tried to read the whole thing but my eyeballs kept sliding off the screen in futile rebellion against a greater nervous system that can force them to read New Yorker pieces all day, if that’s how you’re going to act!
My interpretation (hard conclusions are impossible to draw from this sort of NPC content) is that Lane believes Luhrmann should have been harder on Elvis for making crappy movies, BUT credit Luhrmann for not dwelling too long on the crappy movies.
Lane is not entirely esoteric in his criticism. A film about Elvis needs more sex and drugs, he proclaims. But first of all, how often did Elvis get laid? He was weird and shy and controlled by his mother. Secondly, and in an attempt to segue into my own thoughts on Elvis, drugs are everywhere in this film. And I credit Luhrmann: while there are only a few shots of Elvis popping pills, and little mention of his drug use until the end, we see the stimulants in action on stage. It’s a visual trip down amphetamine lane, culminating in an incredibly over-the-top performance of Suspicious Minds, the highlight of the film.
It’s a highlight not only because of all the sweat and drugs and karate chops and hip thrusts, but because Luhrmann finally went against his natural instinct to ruin everything by mixing some Nicki Minaj into the track, or mashing in some gospel music to remind us that Elvis is either a cultural appropriator or civil rights warrior (SPOILER ALERT: HE BECOMES A GREAT CIVIL RIGHTS CRUSADER WHO CRIES WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN ON THE TV)
The early going of Elvis is truly destroyed by the Luhrmann signature mashup. I wanted to turn it off, but my wife is infatuated by this Austin Butler punk who plays Elvis, and I must admit he is quite charismatic. Ladies, your birds are sure to twitch at Austin Butler’s performance. It’s possible this is a gay film: the seminal moment of Elvis’ career, according to Baz Luhrmann, is the time he opted to put on a leather outfit for a TV show. Butler gamely puts the ensemble through pelvic stress testing - are we watching porn?
Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker seems to be conspiring with Luhrmann to destroy the Elvis legacy. He prances about in a dumb fat suit, talking in a horrible Dutch accent that sounds nothing like the actual Colonel - he’d have sounded more like Sanders with no accent. Luhrmann/Hank’s version of Parker is a cartoon villain who, 20 years into Elvis’ career, rants and raves publicly about the evils of rock and roll. Hanks is not even up to acting as a cartoon, or he doesn’t care, or given his stature in Hollywood is playing some meta game where he sucks on purpose because he hates Elvis and is just cynically cashing in. Is he clever enough for that? I’m always trying to figure out how Tom Hanks is top of the Hollywood food chain. It’s not acting ability, charisma, or looks.
It’s not just that Hanks is bad; the script creates this Parker villain with little reference to reality. I see Parker as the man who protected Elvis from the record industry cult, disagree if you like, but why invent a buffoonish history for him that only muddies historical waters? Spoiler alert, LOL, the fact that Parker isn’t his real name turns into the catalyst for the 3rd act. The film is not clear on why this makes him evil but, desperate to reclaim a footing within the 3-act structure, hinges its climax on the fateful moment Elvis is awakened to the truth of the Name Change. Who wrote this crap?
Vanity Fair’s Alanna Nash has also attempted a review, which purports to defend Parker, when the author is not dramatizing her own personal encounter with the man:
As someone who knew Colonel Parker and had three, tense, three-hour meetings with him over a two-year span in the ’90s, I admit there were times I felt a chill of evil from him that scared the hell out of me and made me fear for my personal safety, especially during a ride through the Vegas desert.
What a scoop! Almost murdered by Colonel Parker! Wait, did I say she defends Parker? Here we go, very next line:
But Luhrmann’s Colonel is straight out of Faust, dripping with the evil of Mephistopheles.
Hard to contrast this abstract idea with the concrete fact that Parker was going to randomly murder this young lady, but it’s something of a rebuke. We have to wait until the end of the review for lurid details of that fateful trip across the desert:
The time he got so mad at me, hammering his cane in the floorboard of his Buick on that ominous ride through the Sin City desert, was when I asked him why he didn’t give Elvis better movie scripts and songs.
“Elvis picked all his own songs and pictures—the scripts were sent directly to his house. The only song I suggested was ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ I got Elvis the most money ever for an entertainer in Las Vegas. People forget that! Nobody! Nobody got more money in the history of Las Vegas!”
She “felt a chill of evil” from Parker’s reaction to possibly the dumbest question ever. Was the Colonel burning the good scripts and delivering crap as some sort of master plan? Is Ms. Nash aware that few are actually capable of evaluating a script, as evidenced by films like Luhrmann’s Elvis? Any shitty Elvis film is far better than this. The fact that Colonel Parker didn’t murder her and dump her body right there shows the man has laudable self-control.
Also, while Ms. Nash was allegedly worrying about being serial killed, Parker’s aged wife was in the car. I wonder how she’d have worded her “review” if the Parkers were still alive. I wonder if the movie would have been made if the Parkers were still alive. Aren’t we polite, that we wait until you die before fabricating histories with you as villain?
As an almost-personally-murdered-by expert of all things Parker, Alanna Nash wants us to be aware that Luhrmann is vilifying the man.
But she does know some things:
Near the end of the film, Elvis learns that Parker is not an American, and doesn’t have a passport, which means Elvis will never fulfill his dream of playing in Europe. That never happened—Elvis died not knowing of Parker’s illegal status—but he would have had to have had a tin ear not to pick up on an accent as obvious as Hanks’s.
Wow, are you telling me that some talented writer forswore reality to create this doozy of an ending? Think about how stupid it all is. Elvis’ dream (which became apparent 2 minutes prior) is to go to Europe, but his manager can’t legally get a passport and who knows what his REAL NAME is! It’s like an episode of the Monkees.
In summary, these music biopics which are all the rage these days just get worse and worse, begging the question: are these writers getting dumber, or is this another front in the left’s culture war versus American history?
Both.
Review of Elvis
Now *that’s* a review!
So many of today’s wannabe blockbusters are nothing more than the blotted stain of self-consciously woke onanism. The camouflage for such dreck is a false gravitas grafted onto any revisionist work that aggressively and egotistically asks its audience to consider subaltern “uncomfortable truths” that, it turns out, are as unreliable as they are hamfistedly delivered.
It’s as if today’s more “serious” filmmakers have been huffing their own mannered, predictable farts for so long that they’ve subtly begun bottling and branding them, then selling them off to the faux intellectuals they cater to as an expensive, exclusive scent.
Hanks has grown fat on his own successes. It’s not that he’s a bad actor (unlike, say, Robin Williams in every serious role he ever attempted); rather, he’s become, as you suggest, a caricature of himself -- an actor who shows you he’s acting in order to be appreciated for having acted reasonably well, despite his early work as the transgender stalker of Donna Dixon. That is to say, his whole career seems like a rehabilitation project cooked up for him by a bald Ritchie Cunningham in a baseball cap. His fame is rigged.
I haven’t seen the movie myself, but now I’m tempted to watch it just so I can hate it on more than merely principle.
Nice job!
It's a bit like Magic Mike in how it turns women into drooling zombies, if my wife is any indication. Though Magic Mike was much better of course.
Been a fan of yours forever; your They/Them review is better than anything here IMO. You're a true pioneer of gonzo journalism.
I was mocking myself a bit with the 80k word vocabulary thing. Given your casual use of subaltern I'd put you at over 100k. So jelly. My brain is full not even gonna look it up. Don't use it again.