Elvis: To see, or not to see, that is the question
This article first appeared in the August 2022 edition of Comet.
Remember when SBS and then the ABC had film reviewers Margaret (Pomeranz) and David (Stratton) going at it hammer and tongs over their polar opposite views about a movie, and you had to decide which one of them was more you when it came to filmic preferences? Those heady days are, sadly, long gone. But we still have movies which are capable of stirring vigorous debate between reviewers, given the opportunity. And I would love to see John McDonald of The Australian Financial Review and Mark Kermode of The Guardian go head-to-head over Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a film that nothing was going to stop me going to see, and to relive the great songs and gyrating hips of that oh-so-sexy singer who made my teenage heart beat faster way back in the day (and who still bears occasional revisiting on YouTube for nostalgia’s sake).
To put it mildly, it’s clear that McDonald is most emphatically not a fan of Luhrmann’s most recent creations, and he spends a substantial part of his introduction explaining why he doesn’t like Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby and simply hates Australia, before launching into all that he’s deemed bad in Elvis. The film is like “a slide show”, “we never see Elvis as an actual personality, [and] the same applies to everyone else”, the music is used in “the most scattergun fashion”, and “Elvis is pure fairy floss – sickly sweet, colourful and quick to melt into nothingness”. Talk about damning with all out vitriol.
Meanwhile, back in The Guardian, Kermode has awarded that same movie one of the rarest of accolades: five whole stars. I can’t remember the last film that got such unqualified rapture. He too does a quick wrap of several Luhrmann films, but from the opposite camp of enthusiastic praise, before moving on to describe Elvis as a “riotously audacious work, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the king of rock’n’roll and his puppet-master promoter”, and, all up, concludes that “with electrifying performances from Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, Baz Luhrmann’s whirlwind biopic is cinematic dynamite”.
Ideally, I would have preferred to see the movie before the reviews. But they got there first, so now it’s just a matter of taking one side or another. Or some middle road. And my award goes to….neither. I have to admit to checking out information about Colonel Tom Parker before seeing the film, which shows that his nefarious reputation is richly deserved, in his brutal entrapment of a vulnerably talented young man. That story, to me, is front and centre in Elvis, turning it into neither floss nor dynamite, but a profound tragedy of Shakespearean depths.
Anne Ring ©2022