The life of the king of rock and roll takes on a stratospheric dimension in Baz Luhrmann’s latest film, this summer’s best theatrical release.
Sounds hip hop in the mythical Beale Street of Memphis, one of the cradles of blues. Eminem. Also Doja Cat. Even Diplo. The most purists are outraged. Sacrilege! Who can think of inserting music from the 21st century in a scene set in the mid-fifties of the last century? Little inconsistency.
Perhaps they forget, or directly ignore, that in Moulin Rouge (2001) sounded like Fatboy Slim, Beck or David Bowie. Yes, a film that dealt with the splendor of a cabaret at the beginning of the 20th century, decades before any of these musicians were born. That’s how it is Baz Luhrman.
Nothing new under its sun. Up to a certain point transgressive, always prowling the postmodern, although in reality it is not possible to speak of inconsistency if we notice that the hip hop is part of the same lineage as the bluesthe soul or the funky, is a tributary of the same line of succession, even though what it represents as a link is staged for us almost as a sound uchrony. In a presumably alien context.
“There are those who are outraged by the inclusion of hip hop, perhaps because they forget or ignore that in “Moulin Rouge” (2001) Fatboy Slim, Beck or Bowie were already playing.
A more than justified tribute, in any case, to the enormous flow of black music that an adolescent Elvis Presley came across in the form of a watershed: the vibrant scene in which he debates between the lust of a torrid house of blues and the spirituality of a church gospel. It excites. What are the hip hop and the r’n’b but reformulations of all that?
And it is fantastic that it is so. That is how Luhrmann’s cinema continues to be. Because it can be said that his Elvis (2022) is also his best film since the one starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor two decades ago. It is a lavish show that should be seen in a movie theater. Two and a half hours of frenzy. A sound and visual feast. Whether the mythical figure of Elvis Presley suggests something to you or if he doesn’t at all.
In his usual style: excessive, fast-paced, fragmented, sometimes even overwhelming, visually magnetic. Whoever wants to cling to a story that is one hundred percent faithful to the real story, should get a good documentary. You don’t need this. It’s cinema. And the big one. One more time.
“It is an excessive film, accelerated, fragmented, sometimes overwhelming and visually magnetic, like the best Luhrmann”.
Tom Hanks more than fulfills his role as Colonel Parker, with the histrionics that the character demands, the common thread in his mission as a great villain, but austin butler He directly comes out in his antagonistic role as the king of rock, embroidering that innocent, vulnerable and provincial character who, unable to leave the US other than to do his military service, finds himself confined in his gold prison in Las Vegas for a good period of money but also doomed to an insoluble and fatal addiction to all kinds of pills. The obesity. The decadence. Death at only 42 years old, after a scenic revival that was predicted unlikely.
Butler’s musical performances in Las Vegas and also in Tennessee are marvelous, but it is the Australian filmmaker’s direction that masterfully connects with the altered collective psyche of a country subjected to ups and downs (the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the crimes of Altamont and the Manson family) that would change the course of history. The reborn Elvis of Las Vegas, the one from the seventies, was like a kind of hyperbolic return to the founding myth of rock, a proudly tacky throwback to the mother’s womb in times of irreversible change (the glam rockthe progressive) in a country and a society that would never be the same again.
Do not miss the opportunity to see it. And if she is in a cinema, better.