Elvis reviews are starting to roll in, and they praise actor Austin Butler’s performance in the epic biopic while noting that the direction is a bit over-the-top. The Baz Luhrmann-helmed movie is set to open in theaters on June 24, but it was recently screened for audiences and critics at the Cannes film festival in Italy. Per the AV Club, the film is reported to have been met with a standing ovation. Following the Cannes premiere, many outlets began publishing reviews, and it seems that reactions are fairly mixed overall.
However, the one thing that almost everyone seems to agree on is that Butler’s portrayal of Elvis Presley is very good. “As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off impersonating one of the most indelible icons in American pop-culture history, the answer is an unqualified yes,” wrote THR critic David Rooney. “His stage moves are sexy and hypnotic, his melancholy mama’s-boy lost quality is swoon-worthy and he captures the tragic paradox of a phenomenal success story who clings tenaciously to the American Dream even as it keeps crumbling in his hands.” Scroll down to read more reviews of, and reactions to, Elvis.
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“A Hole at its Center”
While Rooney had a lot of praise for Butler, he still took issues with other aspects of Elvis, including the script and Tom Hanks’ character. “But the heart of this biopic is tainted, thanks to a screenplay whose choppy patchwork feel perhaps directly correlates to its complicated billing – by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner; story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner,” he wrote. “That mouthful suggests an amalgam of various versions, though the big hurdle is the off-putting character piloting the narrative, who creates a hole at its center.”
Rooney continued, “That would be ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in arguably the least appealing performance of his career – a creepy, beady-eyed leer from under a mountain of latex, with a grating, unidentifiable accent that becomes no less perplexing even after the character’s murky Dutch origins have been revealed. It’s a big risk to tell your story through the prism of a morally repugnant egotist, a financial abuser who used his manipulative carnival-barker skills to control and exploit his vulnerable star attraction, driving him to exhaustion and draining him of an outsize proportion of his earnings.”
“One of the Best Sequences…”
In his review, Deadline writer Pete Hammond pointed to the film’s depiction of Elvis’ famous comeback performance as being one of its highlights. “One of the best sequences in the film revolves around the 1968 ‘comeback’ TV special, where Elvis – in a black leather suit and returning to the music that made him – re-ignited his career after Hollywood grew tired of the formula Parker trapped his boy in. True to form, Parker wanted a more conventional Elvis on this special; he wanted him to wear a holiday sweater and sing a couple of Christmas tunes, and that is how he sold the show. He was one-upped though by Presley himself and the special’s director Steve Binder (Declan Montgomery), who used the platform to return the King to his throne by ignoring Parker’s orders.”
“Ideal Choice”
Offering praise for the film’s star, Hammond wrote, “Butler, previously best known in movies for playing Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, is an ideal choice as Presley both visually and vocally, and he actually sings himself in the first half during the early Elvis era (replaced by tracks of the real Elvis in the later years). Perhaps more than anyone who has seriously taken on Elvis, Butler thrillingly succeeds, especially in the film’s first half, with an authentic rhythm that makes us wonder what greater heights Elvis could have climbed had he not succumbed to the dark side of his own fame.”
“Compulsively Watchable…Fever Dream”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman seemed someone split on the film, stating, “Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream – a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera. Luhrmann, who made that masterpiece of romantically downbeat razzle-dazzle Moulin Rouge! (and in 20 years has never come close to matching it), isn’t interested in directing a conventional biography of Elvis. And who would want him to? Luhrmann shoots the works, leaping from high point to high point, trimming away anything too prosaic (Elvis’s entire decade of churning out bland Hollywood musicals flashes by in an eye-blink). He taps into the Elvis of our reveries, searing us with the king’s showbiz heat and spinning his music – and how it was rooted in the genius of Black musical forms – like a mix-master across time.”
“The King’s Electrostatic Moves”
Commenting on Butler’s performance and portrayal of Elvis, Gleiberman wrote, “Austin Butler, the 30-year-old actor who plays Elvis, has bedroom eyes and cherubic lips and nails the king’s electrostatic moves. He also does a reasonably good impersonation of Elvis’s sultry velvet drawl. Yet his resemblance to Elvis never quite hits you in the solar plexus. Butler looks more like the young John Travolta crossed with Jason Priestly, and I think the reason this nags at one isn’t just because Elvis was (arguably) the most beautiful man of the 20th century.”
He continued, “It’s also that Butler, though he knows how to bring the good-ol’-boy sexiness, lacks Elvis’s danger. Elvis had a come-hither demon glare nestled within that twinkle of a smile. We’ve lived for half a century in a world of Elvis impersonators, and Butler, like most of them, has a close-but-not-the-real-thing quality. He doesn’t quite summon Elvis’s inner aura of hound-dog majesty.”
“Immaculate” Imitation
Finally, Indie Wire writer David Ehrlich made it clear that he was not a fan of much in Elvis, but he did praise Butler’s performance. “Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born.”
“Sensory Overload”
Summarizing his D-grade review, Ehrlich concluded, “Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most swooningly electric moments in modern cinema, from the fish tank sequence in “Romeo + Juliet” to the elephant medley in Moulin Rouge! and that fantastic party sequence in The Great Gatsby, but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped braid the present into the past in a way that made them both feel more alive. Elvis discovers no such purpose. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better.”
