I Watch Films: Elvis

 

Elvis

A biopic of the great rock and roll star Elvis Presley, more or less framed by his manager Colonel Tom Parker. Parker is managing a travelling show, with some country music stars. We hear Elvis, learn he’s a white man from Mississippi, growing up poor in a black neighbourhood after his father goes to jail, then having a hit record based on the black music scene he’s part of. Then women – and girls – go crazy for him as he does a shaking dance (explicitly calling back to people shaking and speaking in tongues in a black church in his childhood).

This causes trouble. He’s getting the youth all worked up, he’s hanging around with black people, his music is… well it’s good in fact but they hate it, for theys that include the police and city councils. Tom Parker tries to get him to tone it down, do a comedy Hound Dog bit in a tailcoat on TV but it doesn’t work out. This keeps happening; Tom Parker will try and offer a solution to a problem and Elvis will prefer to go with his gut. Actually that’s not quite true, sometimes Tom Parker will suggest something that helps him, personally, out  and it works; for example having Elvis play Vegas, where he gets an even bigger cut, complimentary suite and help with his gambling debts, and having him not tour abroad as Parker doesn’t have a passport and didn’t have the paperwork to get one. Also Parker has him join the army and do normal army stuff, not a promotional tour, which leads Elvis to meet Priscilla, his wife.

As I said it’s vaguely framed by Colonel Tom Parker, specifically him dying in Las Vegas in 1997. In theory this is him hallucinating the story on his deathbed. So it has a bit of a dreamlike quality, scenes linked by music or theme, almost blending together while eliding years. Linked by music, and here is the major element that makes it succeed. The use, re-use and re-framing of the music, never quite as it was because we can’t quite recapture that moment, but adding to the context, not changing it completely.

Anyway, this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Elvis, because if you have some of the facts, then you know that this is just a story, and if you don’t, it will just tell you a story. But it does – and here’s the second hallucinatory quality – it does give us some of the feeling of what being in the wake of Elvis may have been like, in part due to the powerful, mythic performance of Austin Butler.

I liked it. It’s just another Elvis story. Another bit of the Elvis legend. Taking a look at what happened and maybe why it was the way it was.

Watch This: A cool biopic that attempts to evoke the personality of Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker
Don’t Watch This: You can learn more about Elvis from books, or feel his presence in his own music, or maybe even one of the films he was in