Elvis is still charming audiences and critics around the world, but it told the wrong story and ultimately hurt the movie. Luhrmann’s film conforms rather rigidly to the montage-heavy formula laid down by so many musical biopics, despite its electric central performance from Austin Butler. Too many musical biopics all adopt the same routine structure, and though often successful and a shoo-in for award nominations, their life-spanning narratives usually do their subject a disservice. This overused and almost inflexible rise-and-fall-and-rise-again trajectory attempts to cram in every apparently indispensable detail: career beginnings, initial controversies, the eventual success, the fame, the wild days, the bad management, the recovery, and then one final hurrah. In the end, rarely anything more meaningful is learned beyond what could be gleaned from Wikipedia, regardless of the flashy direction and stunning portrayals.
The kind of generic storytelling in musical biopics that it has already been parodied. In 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the genius genre send-up about the tumultuous life of a fictional country singer, should have ended the generic biopic in its tracks. Its satire destroyed every tired element of the genre so resolutely and hilariously. The problem, however, is that Walk Hard bombed hard at the box office. Though it eventually became a cult favorite, it failed to make enough of a commercial impact to force future musical biopics to even attempt a different approach. In a post-Walk Hard world, it’s hard to take many of these formulaic biopics seriously.
This is precisely why Luhrmann’s film should have narrowed the scope of Elvis’ life to focus solely on a significant part of it. The most thematically ripe and dramatically ironic aspect of Elvis Presley’s life as presented in Luhrmann’s movie is his 1970s Vegas period. During that time, his career was hamstrung by a bad management deal that led to his illness and substance abuse, yet he was also designated the King of Rock n’ Roll and gave everything during every performance. This perfect dichotomy would have allowed the film to simultaneously depict Elvis at his worst and best while skipping the unnecessary run-down of his life prior to this period. Sadly, musical biopics rarely divert from the formulaic storytelling Luhrmann ultimately stuck with. Daring biopics shake up the formula or completely disregard it, such as I’m Not There (where multiple actors play Bob Dylan), The Last Days (a fictionalized account of Kurt Cobain’s final days), and Love & Mercy (where Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian Wilson). If Luhrmann had also eschewed the musical biopic formula and kept the focus on a shorter but altogether more crucial aspect of Elvis’ life, Elvis could have offered more about its subject by focusing more intently on less.
As it is, Elvis is a good but still mostly generic biopic that operates like a checklist of story beats and it deserved more. Focusing on Elvis’ Vegas period would have allowed for a more organic and less mechanical exploration of his marriage breakdown and failing health, in addition to covering his relationship with Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker during its most strained period. Elvis’ legendary Vegas performances would have been reframed as being all the more poignant, too. A single flashback or a short prologue from his glorious 1950s period is all that would have been needed to set up his tragic downfall.
As Elvis continues to be a commercial success, it is safe to say that the formulaic musical biopic is not going away anytime soon. Luhrmann’s film is certainly a crowd-pleaser, but it missed a clear opportunity to tell a more interesting and emotionally resonant story. A version focused on Elvis’ Vegas period may have sacrificed mainstream appeal and perhaps would have needed a more low-key director than Luhrmann to pull it off, but it would have certainly captured a fascinating chapter in Elvis’ life. Here’s hoping the announced Michael Jackson biopic will learn a lesson or two from Walk Hard before cameras start rolling.
