Baz Luhrmann is an awesome filmmaker who chooses subjects as extravagant as the genre lets him. When he decided to make a teen romance, it was William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Then came his musical Moulin Rouge, scored with love songs from nearly every pop era. For a literary adaptation, he went with the totemic, allegedly unadaptable ‘The Great Gatsby’. As an Australian director who made a movie about Australia and called it Australia too. Then Luhrmann decided to make a biopic about a musician, what can be better unsurprisingly alighted on a rock-and-roll singer of some notoriety: Elvis Presley.
You won’t take a chance to get away of the charm of the star Austin Butler as he takes to the stage as the King of Rock and Roll, even though Baz Luhrmann’s film is told from the perspective of Tom Hanks’ character. Elvis, the pointed biography starring Austin Butler in the title role, is quite a mixed experience. This short, typically flamboyant film by Baz Luhrmann brings out a real essence of a rock star’s life…
Elvis has your fill and wants you to have his — from that moody, sultry voice to those hooded, shaded eyes and perfectly kissable lips. And that’s prior we get to the parts which drove girls into ecstasy at his concerts.
As per Elvis movie review, sometimes, it functions as a full-blown musical. Other times, it forgets to put on its protagonist’s colossal onstage skill. The script is driven to the familiar beats of Presley’s life, even as Luhrmann’s flashy path tries to conceal the severe formula of the music biopic. The rise-and-fall narrative that’s so well known that it was satirized by the devastating 2007 satire ‘Walk Hard’.
Luhrmann’s take on this biopic works for one reason: Elvis should be a mess. Presley’s adult life was chaotic, which unfolded almost entirely in public, from his outstanding successes to his ignominious fall. Watching this film give a little disorienting feel.
That’s the best explanation for why you can thoroughly enjoy Elvis, despite some storytelling bloat and final-act purposelessness. The film is fuelled by Luhrmann’s energetic style, to which the viewers will count themselves as a fan, even though it can be polarizing as well.
Luhrmann presents the familiar narrative with enough vigor to make it feel new, successfully balancing Elvis’s inherent specialness. He matched it with what rendered him, in his untimely end, a glamorous fossil, waiting to have his talents unearthed again and again by future generations.