Best Picture Is All Shook Up with Baz Lurhmann’s Love Letter to Elvis

This year, we will revisit two American icons whose lives are infamous tragedies, Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe in Blonde and Baz Luhrmann’s sublime ode to the King, Elvis Presley. As someone who knows quite about both of their lives, I had low expectations heading into Elvis. Like Marilyn, Elvis’s combination of mannerisms, body language, and uniquely legendary voice are nearly impossible to recreate. There was a magic in him that came from where he was born, how he was raised. With Elvis, as with Marilyn, they were dirty sweet. They could navigate the puritanical 1950s while flirting with the edge of the danger of the sexual freedom that would explode a decade or so later.

To really understand Elvis’ popularity, and Marilyn’s for that matter, you have to understand the 1950s. It was like a dried-out pile of weeds and Elvis was like a lit match. All that pent-up sexuality, all of that repression that was about to burst into a full-blown wildfire in the 1960s was in every one of Elvis’ hip thrusts. The screaming women — what could they do? It was all beyond their control. The arrival of the Beatles in 1964, a decade after Elvis, would finally rip the lid off the repression and would help launch the upcoming counter-culture revolution.

Just tell me how you resist this — I dare you to even try:

THAT combination of traits, those gifts, that face, that voice, that body — it all lives on the street called OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Even today it lives on that street. Even today it sets one’s loins aflame. In his prime, Elvis was like a sugar cone of melty vanilla ice cream on a hot summer day — you don’t even need a spoon, man. The drippier the better.

You can just feel the devil dancing inside the bodies of young women who have been told to behave for too long. Many of them would never abandon their love for the King.

Finding someone who can do THAT wasn’t going to be easy. But somehow Baz Luhrmann found that magic combo in Austin Butler, last seen being chewed up by Brad Pitt’s dog in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Luhrmann has made his best film since Moulin Rouge and should see his FIRST Best Director nomination with this film, which he richly deserves, and should also pick up Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Costumes, Production Design nods. Luhrmann has made it his own. Meaning you have to be okay with his style, which is somewhat subdued here. He works almost as a visual artist, putting clips together like a collage that doesn’t exactly tell a linear story. In this case, though, there are just a few things he had to get exactly right, the casting of Butler is at the top of that list.

There aren’t many clips available showing just what Butler does with this absolutely incredible turn as Elvis – but this one shows a bit of it:

Generation-Z might not entirely get what this particular thing Elvis did was all about. I mean, in an era with free porn, a guy moving his knees and hips around seems rather tame. But it was, quite simply, a taste of wild sexuality the 1950s just didn’t yet know.

Luhrmann clearly knows his Elvis story, every tiny bit of it, and the more you know about it, the more you will enjoy this movie. You know the highs and you know the lows. That makes this a film that is headed nowhere fast and fun. Luhrmann doesn’t stop the story before it gets to the bad part. That Elvis was taken advantage of by Col. Tom Parker is part of the Elvis lore. Played here by Tom Hanks, he serves as both the loathsome dark force in Elvis’s life, and our guide through Elvis’s story. It has always been a sad tragedy that a mess of a man like Parker outlived the young Elvis who died at just 42.

Elvis’s legacy threads through American history and its geography. You can drive through Mississippi and find his tiny shack in Tupelo. You can drive down to Memphis and visit Graceland. He was a Southern boy, but his influence stretched across the globe. Whatever it was that Elvis had was something ultimately fragile. There were too many people who wanted too much of him. By the time he died, his organs had swelled to double their size.

This film makes you want to reach back in history and rescue Elvis from the clutches of those who sponged off him, who helped drive him to the brink with too many drugs and, dare we say, too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches. It’s a story with an unhappy ending.

Luhrmann rescues the legacy of Elvis, who has been accused of cultural appropriation, by showing his deep roots in the Memphis music scene, having grown up in that world. He was singing the music of Black legends, for sure, and becoming famous in white America for it, but in his heart, he always understood their worth in American history and in his own legacy.

As with so many things in our American story, anyone can reject them outright if they want. Maybe that makes some people feel better, or more righteous — but you will miss this beautiful man’s presence in your life, which isn’t nothing.

When a potential Oscar contender is hyped at Cannes, we’re still really looking at the echo chamber that film criticism has become. While it’s true that the Oscar voters are now more in line with that hive mind than they’ve ever been, audiences are already showing how much they like the movie:

Film criticism and Oscar punditry should never have slept together. Now they have created an unwanted love child. In this case, I would suggest not reading the reviews but instead just spending a few hours with Baz Lurhmann’s exceptional love letter to the King. If he didn’t love his subject he would have made a bad movie. But his love shines through every frame and is contagious. He has managed to revive Elvis with the right actor given the right freedom to deliver this spectacular performance.