Elvis

Tom Hanks and Austin Butler in “Elvis.” Warner Bros. image via IMDB

Labor Day didn't just mark the beginning of fall – it also signaled an early start to film awards season. The first DVD screener “for your consideration” just arrived in my mailbox. Which means it's time to dust off the blog and let the games begin.

The Emmys will be broadcast Monday on NBC where two of the very few series I've seen and written about here – “Ted Lasso” and “The White Lotus” – have chalked up a whole lot of nominations. Meanwhile, recent coverage from film festivals in Cannes and Venice is already handicapping early picks for this year's Oscar field.

Baz Luhrmann's “Elvis,” an exuberant revision of the mythology surrounding rock 'n' roll's first – and still greatest – demigod, premiered at Cannes. It's playing in theaters, but is also available on HBO Max, which is where I saw it.

Austin Butler's channeling of the rock icon – nailing his singing voice, his guitar moves, the curl of his lip in his angel-devil smile-sneer, and the unspeakable things he does with certain parts of his anatomy – are all pretty astounding. His “Baby Let's Play House” has the same jaw-dropping effect on the film audience it did on the orgiastic bobby soxers in the audience when he made his pink-suited debut more than a half-century ago.

Although Elvis preceded the musical renaissance ushered in by the Beatles that's now known as the Sixties, he embodied the revolutionary racial reckoning of those turbulent times. Growing up poor white in the bible-thumping segregated South of the 1950s exposed him to what would become the origins of his music. 

As Luhrmann's never subtle camerawork and editing show, a mix of tent-show revival frenzy, black gospel and the primal sensuality of black blues shaped the phenomenon he would become. 

Of course it wasn't the music's origins that got everyone's attention. It was the SEX. The forces that overtook Elvis' body when he started to play were centered in his groin as much as his voice, a fact that Luhrmann's cinematography never let us forget. From stirring unfamiliar – unthinkably sinful – sensations in his first teen fans, to the well-coiffed bejeweled women old enough to be their mothers and grandmothers packing Las Vegas' International showroom where his career ended two decades later, Elvis' sexuality was the paradigm shift that changed the world.

All of this is fascinating enough, but the joker in Luhrmann's hand isn't the film's titular character. Instead, it's the diabolical puppet master who created him. Tom Hanks gets top billing as Elvis' manager from the beginning of his career to its end, Colonel Tom Parker. A carnival sideshow huckster by trade, “the colonel” serves as the story's narrator, offering self-serving platitudes about his own smarmy role in the creation of the juggernaut that would bear Elvis' name.

Not to give away any spoilers here, but the Colonel Sanders stereotypes most of us have always associated with this ubiquitous figure in Elvis' career – beginning with being a colonel, being Southern, even being an American – are off the mark. Way off.

Between the prosthetics, the fat suit and the accent, Hanks' portrayal never worries about taking it over-the-top. Like Elvis himself, the colonel is well suited to director Luhrmann's fondness for flamboyance. Less a Machiavellian plotter than a sleazy opportunist in way over his head, the colonel and the creation he calls “my boy” are a symbiotic tag team, each impossible without the other.

Alas, as with so many artistic geniuses, Elvis Presley's human frailties didn't equip him to cope with the magnitude of his gift. He was a mere vessel for a prodigious force that possessed him when he performed, the way talking in tongues overcame the the sinners in those tent shows he grew up with. And, while his story hardly qualifies as a tragedy, it was one more illustration of the clichés about what fame and fortune – in this case, pink Cadillacs, jetliners, pills and women on the road – can provide. And what they can't.

Obviously, the film is going to draw huger audiences than it would if it were titled “Colonel Tom and Me.” The sheer force of a certain kind of star power hasn't diminished since Elvis introduced it all those lifetimes ago. 

“Elvis” can't entirely overcome the challenge of transcending time, making us forget the very different world we live in now compared to the one Elvis grew up in, before rock 'n' roll, when the sounds coming out of Memphis' Sun Studios were still called “race music.”

At two hours and forty minutes, “Elvis” feels as flabby as the star got at the end of his career. More time in the editing room and less on the screen might have tempered the urges for excess that the director shares with his film subject. 

Shortening the running time would also amplify “Elvis'” greatest strength – the music, as mighty now as it ever was.