Review of Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann

For so long, I held off on watching the Elvis movie. Everyone was talking about it and Austin Butler for a hot minute, which led me to really be turned off of the movie when it first came out in theaters. I don’t like it when a movie is too oversaturated upon release sometimes.

That said, I was bored on one random afternoon in 2024, procrastinating on my master’s thesis, when I decided to turn on the television and watch something. I scrolled onto Netflix, and there this movie was. It had just been added, and Netflix was telling me that it was totally recommended for me.

I rolled my eyes, as I have nothing to do with Elvis on a daily basis, but then I thought about when I watched Priscilla in theaters. It was that film that convinced to watch this one, as I knew that I had seen one side of the story and wanted the other.

So I pressed play, and this is how I watched this movie two years too late. Here’s my review.

The story of Elvis’ rise and fall, but told in quite the dramatic fashion.

Now, this is a Baz Luhrmann movie, so if you’re expecting a standard biopic, you were coming into the wrong movie. His style is flashy and over the top, and this fits right into his standard filmography here.

The way this story is told is through alternating between past and present. The present is 1997, when Elvis’ former manager is in the hospital after having a heart attack. He’s Tom Parker, and he’s reflecting on how he worked with and met the King of Rock n Roll.

Elvis was raised in Mississippi with his mother, Gladys, and he spent his days listening to music and consuming comic books as a young boy. His parents relocate the family to Memphis, where he hangs out on Beale Street, a Black neighborhood. It’s there he becomes smitten with African American beats.

As he grows up, he continues going here and finding these influences. When he performs at a carnival, a country singer manager things he’s Black after hearing him, but when he witnesses how the girls go crazy for Elvis, he asks him to come on tour. He wants control of his career, and Elvis, naively, agrees to these terms.

Elvis starts blowing up, allowing the family to no longer be poor, and he makes his father the manager of his business.

However, the government officials don’t like Elvis, and people think he’s corrupting the youth with his style and beliefs. Parker is summoned before a Congressman in order to be grilled about Elvis, but when Elvis does sexual dance moves at a concert, this might be the end.

Elvis is drafted into the Army to avoid major backlash, where he meets 14-year-old Priscilla, and falls in love with her. They’ll marry later, but when he comes back from Germany, he becomes a film star.

Major events from the sixties pass by, and while Elvis wants to be more active with politics and doing the right thing, his manager prevents him from doing that. He’s booked on a Christmas show that’s family friendly instead, but Elvis works with Steve Binder to make the show more political.

The corporate backers of the show are pissed, but the show does well. Elvis continues to be successful, but his manager is cracking down on controlling his life, and Elvis is tricked into signing a contract for a casino residency. He starts falling to drugs and his addiction, and Priscilla divorces him.

Elvis wants a world tour, but Parker says no. He realizes Parker can’t even leave the US because he’s stateless and an immigrant, but when he tries to fire the man, Parker reveals the family owes him money. Parker says on as his manager, but the two have a strained relationship from this point on.

This puts more of a toll on Elvis, and Parker, in the present day, recalls how Elvis was falling apart in the end. He dies in 1977, and Parker says that his love for his fans killed him. Parker then dies, and we learn he has no money either.

The final cards reveal Parker abused Elvis, and he settled with the Presley estate. Elvis is still one of the most loved artists in history.

Overall Thoughts

This is a flashy movie, and I admire it for its technical aesthetics and how Butler managed to weave himself into the role of Elvis Presley, but this wasn’t for me in the end.

I think I preferred Priscilla, but I can realize this is more of a gender bias going on here. I can sympathize more with Coppola’s film because I myself study feminist history and filmmaking, and Elvis is very masculine. It promotes the positive spin on his life and work, minus the entire being exploited part.

I think watching these two movies in conversation with each other is really worth considering, though. There was a lot to think about after the fact.

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