Elvis (2022) Review
5/10
Colonel Tom Parker is dying in a Las Vegas hospital in 1997, addresses the audience directly, and explains that history has misunderstood him. The next two hours and thirty-nine minutes are his account.
The 5 is the average of an outstanding central performance and a film that won’t stop moving long enough to let it breathe. Butler disappears into the part completely and Baz Luhrmann cuts away from him constantly.
What the film gets right is the last hour, once the editing calms and the subject becomes a man in a hotel suite who can’t leave. What it never solves is why the person who did it to him is telling the story.
This film left me split down the middle. Butler gives a performance good enough for a far better movie, and for the first hour I wanted to grab Luhrmann’s arm and make him hold a shot. Then the Vegas stretch arrives, the cutting calms down, and the film finally deserves some of the attention Butler has been paying it all along.
The Wrong Narrator
Tom Hanks plays Parker in prosthetics and an accent of uncertain origin, and the film is framed entirely as his testimony. That decision produces the film’s central problem. The film filters every scene through a man arguing his own case. That means the film never gives the audience direct access to Presley and repeatedly tells them what to think about events they’re watching.
An unreliable narrator can be superb, and Badlands on this site is built on one. The difference is that Holly doesn’t know she’s unreliable, and Parker knows exactly what he’s doing. That makes the film a defense attorney’s closing argument.
The film also doesn’t commit to the device. It occasionally cuts away to material Parker couldn’t have witnessed. That means the frame isn’t a frame, it’s a voice the picture uses when convenient.
Hanks’s Parker wears me out. The accent is odd and the prosthetics get in the way, and my bigger complaint is with whoever decided the story belonged to the man who took most of Presley’s money. I think that’s the worst decision in the picture, and nothing Hanks does can fix it.
An unreliable narrator who’s aware of their own unreliability is arguing instead of revealing, and argument is a much narrower tone. The reader spends the whole work assessing a case instead of experiencing a life.
If you build a frame, obey it. A narrator who describes scenes they couldn’t have seen has broken the contract, and the reader stops trusting the structure without knowing why.
Ask who the story belongs to. This one is about Presley, Parker tells it, and the mismatch is visible in every scene where the camera leaves the person the audience came for.
Butler Is the Reason to Watch
The performance isn’t an impression. Butler reportedly spent a long period preparing, does his own singing for the early material, and the physical work is precise without ever tipping into caricature. What he finds is the shyness. Presley in the early sequences is awkward, quiet, uncertain in conversation, and transformed the moment he’s in front of an audience, and the gap between those two states is the whole character. The 1968 special material is the film’s best sustained stretch and Butler holds it together alone. A man in his thirties, in leather, in a small room, doing the thing he’s best at for the first time in years, and knowing exactly what it’s costing him to be allowed to. The later Vegas material is harder and he’s equal to it. The voice drops, the movement becomes heavier, and the performance is a man operating on medication and habit in front of people who are still applauding.
What Butler avoids throughout is the impression trap. The voice, the stance and the lip are all present and none of them is the performance. That’s a matter of how somebody stands in a room when nobody is watching.
The Editing Is Hostile
The first hour is cut at a pace that makes individual images difficult to take in. Split screens, comic book panels, montages inside montages, whip pans, and a needle drop every ninety seconds. It had me gritting my teeth, and it’s a damn waste of a performer this good.
The intention is to convey energy and the effect is exhaustion. An audience can’t build attachment to somebody they’re never allowed to look at for longer than two seconds.
The music choices compound it. The film layers modern hip hop and contemporary production over 1950s material. That’s a defensible idea about how the music felt at the time and the film deploys it so relentlessly that the actual recordings barely appear.
The film knows better. The last hour slows down considerably, holds on faces, lets scenes run, and is immediately more affecting. That shows that the first hour was a choice.
Pace isn’t energy. A reader can’t attach to a character they’re never allowed to know, and rapid cutting between events produces information instead of feeling. The test is whether your reader could describe the protagonist’s face.
When a work slows down and improves, the earlier speed was a decision and not a requirement. Watch for that pattern in your own drafts.
A stylistic device applied to the first act and abandoned in the third has told the reader the device was never necessary.
What It Will Not Say
Presley’s career was built on music developed by Black artists, and the film addresses this and then declines to examine it. The approach is to show him as a boy in Black churches and juke joints, absorbing the music, and to present his later success as a continuation of that instead of as an extraction from it. That’s a defensible position, though it’s only a framing.
Real figures appear briefly. B.B. King, Little Richard and Sister Rosetta Tharpe are present and each one is treated as a validating presence instead of as somebody with a position of their own.
Little Richard is shown performing and is never given a line about what happened to his own version of the same songs. Tutti Frutti was a hit for Pat Boone, and that’s the precise mechanism the film claims to be examining. It walks straight past the question, and I think the film loses its nerve on it, a bigger failing than the editing.
The film also handles Priscilla by not handling her. She’s fourteen when they meet, the film shows the meeting, and the age is never addressed by anybody at any point across two and a half hours.
Olivia DeJonge is given almost nothing to work with as a result. Priscilla exists to arrive, to worry, and to leave, and the one scene where she states her position is the only time the character has a want of her own.
The Last Hour
Once Presley is in Vegas the film finds a subject, which is a man in a contract he can’t escape, performing the same show twice a night for years while his manager covers gambling debts with his earnings.
That material is good and it’s what the whole film should have been. A performer at the height of his ability, physically deteriorating, unable to tour internationally because his manager has no passport, and unable to work out why every proposal is refused. The reveal about Parker’s own status, delivered late, is the one place the frame pays off. A man with no legal standing in the country, who can’t leave it, controlling somebody who could go anywhere.
Hanks is also better in that stretch than in the rest of the film. Once the prosthetics stop being the point and the character is simply a frightened man protecting an arrangement, the performance settles into something recognizable.
The closing footage is real. Presley at the piano weeks before his death, singing Unchained Melody, visibly unwell and still entirely capable, and the film has the sense to simply show it without comment. That footage is the one piece of the film I’d keep if I could keep only one. Presley is visibly unwell and still sings like nobody else alive, and it made me wish the film had trusted him that much for the other two and a half hours. It’s the best decision in the picture and it slightly undermines everything preceding it. Two and a half hours of reconstruction, and the most affecting thirty seconds are a man nobody staged, doing the thing, badly lit, on tape.
When you find your subject in the last act, that was your book. The temptation is to keep the first two acts because they exist, and the correct move is to start where the interest begins. Ask where a reader would say the story really starts. Real footage at the end of a dramatization is a risk, because it invites the audience to compare your reconstruction to the original. This one survives the comparison because Butler is that good, and most films don’t.
A structural reveal has to change the meaning of what came before. Parker’s status recontextualizes every refusal in the film. That’s what a late reveal is for.
Should you watch Elvis?
Yes, for Butler, and skip the first hour if you can bring yourself to. I land on a 5 because the performance deserves far better than the film wrapped around it: a narrator who has no business telling this story, editing that treats stillness as failure, and a script that ducks the hardest questions it raises. Butler finds the shy man underneath the most photographed face of his century, and I wish Luhrmann had trusted him enough to let us watch.
