It’s a bit of received wisdom that biopics, generally, may be seen as Oscar bait: a genre of films that have been militantly designed to impress Academy voters based on how closely they resemble recent history. The track record dictates that playing a real person wins you an Oscar – as was the case for seven of the last 10 best actor winners.
The same logic may not apply for Austin Butler’s turn as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Only in the flimsiest, most surface-level sense is this a biopic – it takes profound, drastically misrepresentative liberties with the truths of Elvis’s life – and in name alone is Butler actually playing Presley. The film, and Butler’s performance, are far greater than that: he is playing Presley as he exists in the cultural imagination, the man who saved American culture and who could unite American politics, a kind of messianic figure who had to use his God-given power to rebuild a world in flux. In other words, he is essentially playing Superman – and Elvis, true to that, plays like Luhrmann’s concession to a superhero film, filled with two-faced enemies creeping in the shadows and shady lobbies looking to thwart our hero at every turn.
So Elvis fails as a biopic – which is fine, because Oscar-y biopics tend to kind of suck anyway, sentimental and overlong as they tend to be. Elvis is anything but. Its version of midcentury America is gleaming and alienesque; each new set, from the carnivals promoted by Tom Hanks’s hucksterish Colonel Tom Parker to the psychedelic, mazelike casinos of 70s Vegas, looks like it’s been rendered from a dream. Luhrmann clearly felt his job here was not to hew closely to reality – when has that ever been his job? – but to make viewers understand the gravity of Presley’s power, and he does so by making every scene feel like a deepfaked TikTok, the lingua franca of the early 2020s. Big Mama Thornton’s voice ripples into Doja Cat’s; Kacey Musgraves emanates from an AM radio; the phrase “In the Ghetto Remix featuring Nardo Wick”, pure gibberish before 2022, begins to take on great meaning. For younger generations, Presley can feel a little like a caricature or a museum piece, and as ludicrous as some of Luhrmann’s choices may seem on paper, they genuinely help convey the singer’s reach and significance in a way that a more reverential director would have struggled with.
Crucially, all this futzing with history and defiling of the classics is in service of a greater point. Luhrmann builds the film’s central narrative around Presley’s relationship with Parker and uses it to tell a story about art’s thorny interaction with commerce. Elvis was made about a decade after Luhrmann’s last feature, and in that time the kind of films he built his name on – innovative, auteurist but undeniably mainstream blockbusters – have been all but decimated by plasticky, characterless sequels and superhero films. The relationship between Presley and Parker is a perfect site for him to unpick the contradictions of mainstream art: Presley is hardly at the height of his power without Parker’s mercantile instincts, which gave him the broadest audience possible; at the same time, it’s those instincts that ultimately destroy him. Luhrmann clearly sees the middle ground between rampant commercialisation and wilful obscurantism as something vital and valuable, practically sanctified – and Elvis, for all its ridiculousness and pomp, makes a case for why.
