Dear Baz, I saw “Elvis”!

Baz, you won me over. After all these years, decades really, you did it. Honestly, man, I don’t really care for your work (not since “Romeo + Juliet”, anyway). 

This isn’t to say that I don’t admire the ambition and while I I feel your choices in execution fascinating, I often am left exhausted by a deluge of imagery that subsumes thinly-written characters. But that’s just me. 

All of that said, you a new a great montage when you make one and despite Eisenstein’s contention that montage is the principle building block of cinema, it takes more than jump cuts and hyperkinetic moves to make a montage meaningful. But Lordy, man, your opening moments in “Elvis” are masterly.

Filmic technique aside, my man (“my man”? Oh, let’s just go with it, shall we?), you did the King proud. Maybe you’re the only person who could. 

Here’s what I’m thinking. Presley is still a motive cultural force, in terms of lasting influence on music as well as a cultural signifier/icon (for a multitude of meanings) and lost in it all is any semblance of a human being. How does anyone capture any of this meaningfully?

Rightly, I think, leaving the narrative in Colonel Tom Parker’s hands is a sound move. He’s an unreliability narrator but so is history. The only people who know who Elvis (or for that matter, the Colonel) was, is Elvis. 

Thankfully, you don’t spend a bunch of time on beating to death Elvis’s “process”; from that terrific passage of young E sneaking peaks at the juke joint to running over to the revival tent, holy shit. Nailed the little EP’s formative years in under ten minutes (and expertly). Blues and gospel might be the basic ingredients of rock and roll, but it required the primordial cosmic soup of America’s Deep South to catalyze it. 

Sure, sure, technically, rock and roll began earlier; but it took Elvis to really shatter the barriers and a) bring people back to the source and b) open it up to where it became more than just teenager music. I get the feeling that you’re more interested in a) because you kept bringing us back to Beale Street and emphasizing Elvis’s returning to gospel later in his career (but had he ever really left? That voice came out of a spiritual yearning that anyone living in desperate poverty and an outcast knows.)

And what of the Colonel? Even before Presley died, a lot of us pegged him for an exploitative, manipulative asshole. When the Presley Estate sued him in the 80s, and there was more Presleyana being published, my mind was made up that Andreas Cornelis van Kujik was the Devil incarnate. 

Over time, I think we all came to terms that there was greater nuance to the story. If the Colonel was only an opportunist, and he very much was, I don’t think he would have lasted as long as he did, and frankly, even though it wasn’t within the film’s scope, he wasn’t unsuccessful prior to or after his affiliation with Elvis. Would it have helped if he had been more open about his past? If he had been more above board? Who knows? His legal status as an undocumented person might have changed quickly if a half-smart lawyer argued that he had proved his worth to American culture. Aw, who knows, Baz? 

In any case, I applaud Tom Hanks’ depiction of Parker. It’s a weird performance and for Hanks, really edgy in the sense that with all the prosthetics, he looks like he could be Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobblepot’s cousin. The decision to use a skewed Dutch accent is pretty swell, too, since it emphasizes the Colonel’s otherness. Had Hanks gone with Parker’s actual accent, it would, I think, have read as either a Foghorn Leghorn satire or a kind of exaggeration that would have actually been more distracting than what we have. 

In any case, it’s obvious that there was genuine love between Elvis and Parker, that it wasn’t just a business deal. 

If i have an issue, biographically, with the flick, by the way, it’s that Elvis’s drug addiction developed in the Army and was pretty much of Presley’s own making. Dr. Nick actually tried to replace Presley’s meds (and other drugs) with placebos. Vernon Presley hired private detectives to find Elvis’s suppliers, but let’s face it, when a junkie wants a fix, he’ll do what he can to get it; and if he’s rich enough and happens to be Elvis Presley, it’s not gonna be too hard to beat the system. But yeah, I had a small problem with depicting Parker as an enabler. The stories are pretty solid that he wasn’t equipped to deal with a younger man in the throes of addiction.

Which isn’t to say that the demands he placed on Presley didn’t exacerbate the problem. Yeah, he did work Elvis Aron Presley to the goddamn bone, but again, to a large degree this was collaborative. Sadly, Elvis’s dreams of being taken seriously as an actor never saw the light of day. Priscilla recently mentioned that Elvis had more serious artistic ambition that was never realized, either owing to the grueling schedule and overarching ambitions of Parker or frankly, Parker’s inability to see how to make those happen.

One slightly lesser gripe I’ve got is that Parker did stay out of Elvis’s way when it came to the music. You capture a lot of that pretty well, but there are a couple of moments where I’m pretty certain it didn’t happen quite like that. 

And that’s when we come back to why the movie is such an outright banger. You know and I know that a flick like this isn’t about by-the-book-historical-accuracy. It’s about burning hearts of drama and the mirror art holds up to the rest of the world and to each of us. “Elvis” is one of those almost frightening films that makes us look at our lives; who do we play and who plays us? I’m using “play” in the colloquial meaning of who conditions, if not manipulates, as well as how solid are the identities we assume? 

For that matter, what do we do when we encounter our own Colonel, particularly when we realize that we are them and they are us? Jesus, Baz, that scene between Butler and Hanks almost shouldn’t have worked but it did. It landed, and hard. 

Expanding to a larger thematic context, I was impressed with how Elvis is seen from the inside as a guy just trying to make music, hang out with his friends and family, who loves his fans, and is self-aware enough to recognize the variability of relevance. None of this is deployed like a truncheon. You, Bromell, Pearce, and Doner did a bang-up job on reining in an almost operatic level of Big Ideas and just let the story and dialog do the work. 

But it wouldn’t have worked if at the center you didn’t have Austin Butler. He’s so good, it’s unnerving. As you know, it’s not in the look; it’s in the voice, and Jesus, he was swell. However, it’s not just that; Butler got a lived-in sense of a restless, creative and love-hungry heart across with some of the subtlest work I’ve seen. His scenes with everyone were rock solid and real. His scenes with Hanks, though, are damn near transcendent. Both guys let the other breathe, react and act, and it’s a joy to watch. It’s in those moments when the prosthetics that kind of add to Hanks’ strangeness, fall away, and you legitimately have an older guy who’s been both guardian angel and devil and a younger guy who’s aware that there’s something evil in the garden attempt to connect. Even in the earlier sequences as Parker is establishing/buying Elvis’s trust, there’s the sense of larger forces at play, but/and these two guys actually like each other. One’s a conman, the other’s one of the greatest performers in history; why wouldn’t they?

Additionally, you scored with showing Elvis’s reactions to the tumult of the sixties, particularly Martin and Bobby’s assassinations. It must have gutted him not to have attended Martin Luther King’s funeral, particularly after getting the call from - was it Mahalia Jackson? since (as is pointed out in the film), he was shot eight miles from Graceland. Of course, Elvis’s statement that Bobby Kennedy’s does affect them right after the Colonel says they don’t get involved, that it has “nothing to do” with them, is a telling point and for more than just character beats: perhaps by 1968, Elvis was in a slump, but to much of America, he did embody the rebelliousness and hope of youth of the generation that presaged the younger kids who were protesting Vietnam and fighting for civil rights. 

There are too many grace notes in this film to share. His chats with B.B. King (dude, Kelvin Harrison, Jr. is so great…you must have seen “Waves”, right?), him watching Little Richard (Alton Mason almost felt like a CGI’d Little Richard he was so good), and oh my goddess, the greatest tragedy is that we won’t get to see Shonda Dukureh anymore; her Big Mama Thornton is a work of supreme beauty and power. Thank you for giving us that much.

The introduction of Schilling and Binder also worked beautifully. Luke Bracey and Dacre Montgomery taking to Elvis on the Hollywood sign was nicely orchestrated and just felt real. More than that, it felt true.

That’s what has surprised me about this film. People could pick it apart about what really happened, what didn’t, but that misses the point. The question is what’s true in this film? There’s the truth that we never know the people behind the popular iconography we imbue them with and that we very often don’t know ourselves. Would that we all had a sense of our places in history to the degree that Parker did. Yes, yes, he had a hyper-inflated sense of self, and yes, here we have to traffic in literary invention, but it’s a smart way to get the question across. The most shapeshifting figure in the film is the one that delivers the smartest lesson, the smarting truth.

There’s also the sheer visceral nature of the effect Elvis had on the fans (yep, especially the women…those panties were probably soaking…) and if I have one more tiny gripe about the film, it’s that we don’t completely get a sense of how much Elvis loved his fans (sure, we get shots of him kissing the girls at concerts and bedding groupies later and there are the various references to bringing himself to them, but maybe it’s just too ineffable to capture). He said that after his family, he loved his fans the most and this wasn’t just words. He lived that mutually supportive relationship from its earliest days to the end. So when Parker tells the audience that at the end, it was the fans that led to his death, it’s one of the moments that didn’t ring true. But then, that’s also the Colonel talking. 

I should probably take a scenic detour to, at the very least, comment on Mandy Walker’s cinematography. I may not have been crazy about “Australia”, but she has an astute visual sensibility. “Hidden Figures” showed she knows how imagery can guide and support a narrative; but her work here is extraordinary. It also only makes sense that you’d keep Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond on. Their editing enhanced the kinetic nature of the tale you told without overwhelming it. There’s some pretty tricky stuff in there and it all landed.

Then there’s the music. I am so glad you found Elliott Wheeler along the way, because frankly, Baz, if I haven’t warmed to your last couple of films, you never fail to deliver kick-ass soundtracks. In a movie that brings a fresh approach to both the biopic genre in general, and Presley in particular, I wondered how the music choices were going to work. I needn’t have worried: the soundtrack’s on heavy rotation. Mad respect, as the children say.

This is a film I could go on about at fairly great length. There are so many moments that worked their magic, although I would have liked to spend more time with Priscilla. Olivia DeJonge delivered the goods and my heart fairly broke for Vernon, sometimes more than once. The sensitivity that Richard Roxburgh brought to the role was lovely. Of course, Helen Thomas as Gladys nailed it. It’s hard to convey enough depth in these types of films, but I think everyone did great work. We got to know the Presleys, we got to know his peers. For a nearly avant-garde telling of the tale, great care was obviously taken to honor these folks as real people. Kudos.

I’ll be straight up with you, Baz; I have a couple of preferences for the little gold guy this season, but if your little indie film took one home, I wouldn’t be disappointed. Good luck, cher mâitre.

Click here for my Oscar Post-Mortem.

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