Elvis (2022) Review

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 a superb central performance and a film that will not stop moving long enough to let it register. 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 cannot leave. What it never solves is why the story is being told by the person who did it to him.

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. Every scene is filtered through a man arguing his own case, which means the audience is never given direct access to Presley and is repeatedly told what to think about events they are watching.

An unreliable narrator can be superb, and Badlands on this site is built on one. The difference is that Holly does not know she is unreliable, and Parker knows exactly what he is doing, which makes the film a defense attorney’s closing argument.

The film also does not commit to the device. It occasionally cuts away to material Parker could not have witnessed, which means the frame is not a frame, it is a voice the picture uses when convenient.

Butler Is the Reason to Watch

The performance is not 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 is 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 carries it alone. A man in his thirties, in leather, in a small room, doing the thing he is best at for the first time in years, and knowing exactly what it is costing him to be allowed to.

The later Vegas material is harder and he is 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, which is 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 register. Split screens, comic book panels, montages inside montages, whip pans, and a needle drop every ninety seconds.

The intention is to convey energy and the effect is exhaustion. An audience cannot build attachment to somebody they are never allowed to look at for longer than two seconds.

The music choices compound it. Modern hip hop and contemporary production are layered over 1950s material, which is a defensible idea about how the music felt at the time and is deployed so relentlessly that the actual recordings barely appear.

What is striking is that the film knows better. The last hour slows down substantially, holds on faces, lets scenes run, and is immediately more affecting, which demonstrates that the first hour was a choice.

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 honestly, and to present his later success as a continuation of that instead of as an extraction from it. That is a defensible position and it is not an argument, it is 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 the film has nothing to say about that, which is the precise mechanism the film claims to be examining, and it walks straight past the whole question without stopping once to look directly at any single part of the question the film has just raised on its own.

The film also handles Priscilla by not handling her. She is 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 cannot escape, performing the same show twice a night for years while his manager covers gambling debts with his earnings.

That material is genuinely good and it is 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 cannot 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.

It is 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.

Should you watch Elvis?

Yes, for Butler, and skip the first hour if you can bring yourself to. A performance that finds the shyness underneath the most photographed man of his century, inside a film narrated by the person who took most of his money and edited as though sitting still were a failure.

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