The Good, the Bad, and the Sublime
Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is a bad movie. It is gross and garish, profoundly superficial (an oxymoron perhaps but applicable here) and wholly unworthy of its subject. Tom Hanks, inexplicably duplicating Adam Sandler's Waterboy accent, gives possibly the most jarringly awful performance ever delivered by a great actor. Austin Butler, for his part, does a pretty good Elvis impression, and he is undeniably dynamic and convincing when singing and dancing. But, given that we have many hours of the actual Elvis doing the same safely preserved on film, what is finally the point of simply (or rather, with unnecessary and visible difficulty!) recreating that footage, and with much worse editing? As a dramatic performance, Butler's off-stage Elvis is buried in the mix and never manages to register as an actual person nor anything close to it. All other characters and performances are just wallpaper, one-dimensional props in Lurhmann's Americana grotesquerie. And the less said about Lurhmann and his co-writers' facile, perfunctory take on the history of US race relations the better – ugh!
Yet, to its credit, this putrid movie revived my interest in Elvis Presley. Or, more accurately – blech! – it prompted me to seek out ASAP a palate cleanser in the form of the real Elvis. The Sun Sessions has always been in sporadic, semi-regular rotation for me; but I hadn't listened to the terrific post-army years Elvis Is Back (1960) or the phenomenal 1968 comeback special for many years, and both are even better than I remembered, the latter awesome even without the iconic visual accompaniment.
I also remembered the recent Elvis Presley: The Searcher, which I had meant to catch at the time but then slipped my mind. This sensitive and patiently paced 3.5-hour documentary seems to have provided the basic, core narrative for Luhrmann's film, which is whatever the exact antonyms of 'sensitive' and 'patiently paced' are. Through well-assembled archival footage combined with the reflections of friends, lovers, collaborators, and perceptive super-fans named Springsteen and Petty, Elvis Presley: The Searcher gives us something that Lurhmann and Butler never do: a remarkable man and distinctive artist named Elvis Aaron Presley. Indeed, Thom Zimny's documentary is probably the first place that longtime admirers and neophytes alike should turn to learn much of substance about Presley's complicated mortal life, aided of course by the audiovisual format. (Greil Marcus's book, Dead Elvis, offers the best reflection of/on Elvis's singularly weird pop-cultural afterlife, something ultimately only tangentially related to Elvis the Artist.)
But best of all, save for the uppermost tier of his musical output, is King Creole. It is one of those serendipitous miracles of the (late) Old Hollywood system: originally intended as a James Dean vehicle, Presley was hired to replace the tragically deceased Dean and was granted a 60-day deferment from military service in Germany to film on location in New Orleans. The story and Presley's character –– a misunderstood delinquent in demand as a nightclub singer and with the ladies –– feels loosely like a version of the exciting, dangerous romantic fantasy that Elvis's early music must've powerfully evoked in its younger listeners (i.e., before Elvis's aura eroded into kitschy clichés under duress from rose-coloured nostalgia, tacky merchandise, and cultural garbage like Lurhmann's Elvis).
A first-rate director, Michael Curtiz, and cinematographer, Russell Harlan, spun that fantasy into a fully realized, truly spellbinding film; Harlan's moody, shadow-drenched cinematography is up there with the most beautiful black-and-white I've ever seen. The supporting cast, from the smallest roles up, is uniformly excellent, vivid sketches suggesting lives still going on when not present on screen. As rival Bourbon Street nightclub owners –– one a decent-enough guy, the other a sinister crime boss –– Paul Stewart and Walter Matthau are superb, as are Carolyn James and Dolores Hart as love interests, the former a femme fatale, the latter a shopgirl-next-door, both multi-dimensional characterizations that get beyond these stock types. Presley himself is pure, simmering charisma, sans corn or cheese. He handles the taciturn dramatic scenes at least as well as James Dean conceivably would have, while unsurprisingly acing the (credibly in-character) musical numbers with infinite aplomb.
What was the big deal about Elvis, anyway? Forget all the later (and posthumous) kitsch, avoid Luhrmann's execrable flick at all costs. Queue up the '50s and ''60s records, watch King Creole, then Elvis Presley: The Searcher, and you will understand. (R.I.P. Lisa Marie)
