Tom Hanks Spoils Austin Butler As "Elvis"

#182: "Elvis," "Marcell The Shell With Shoes On," "Amadeus," "Save Yourselves!"

Edition 182:

Hey movie lovers!

As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!

In this week’s newsletter: An Elvis Presley biopic is capturing all the headlines, if not our hearts. Also in theaters, one of the most wholesome movies in years is like Bugs Life but for a mollusk with sneakers. Plus a couple streaming recs! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” I’ve gotten a sneak peak of one of the year’s best movies, coming to a streaming service next month.

Elvis

At no point in the last 30 years of moviemaking has anyone been able to make a reasonable case that Tom Hanks was the reason why a movie didn’t work.

Until now.

The main character of Baz Luhrman’s new biopic of Elvis Presley is not the King of Rock and Roll, as you might expect in a movie entitled…Elvis, but rather Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ longtime manager. That fundamental storytelling decision leads the movie down a road that results in an ultimately disappointing movie that does little more than advocate for a reexamination of the real life Elvis’ legacy.

It’s easy to say that viewers would’ve preferred a movie that dug into the inner life of Elvis, one that took us behind the curtain and perhaps even into the mind of the man behind the glittery jumpsuits. But maybe giving us fresh insight into that was too difficult, or the Elvis estate (who had to sign off on the project) didn’t want Lurhman filling in the blanks with his own creation. So instead, Elvis is along for the ride as the Colonel serves as our fourth wall-breaking narrator.

This outsider POV has worked in the past — after all, the similarly constructed Amadeus is one of the best music biopics ever and truly one of the best movies of the past 40 years — so one could be forgiven for turning the reigns over to what could be assumed to be the most reliable pair of hands in all of Hollywood.

Hanks is done no favors by the script, which casts him as an unambiguous force of evil who steals from and ultimately all-but kills Elvis, and then expects him to continue to be the audience’s shepherd through the entire story.

But no excuses can be made for what is truly one of the worst performances of his legendary career. His physicality and voice are so extreme as to be comical, enough to take someone out of the suspension of disbelief entirely and think “wow Tom Hanks sounds so weird” in basically every scene.

The strangest thing, in a movie that delivers such a note perfect imitation of Elvis himself, is that the real life Colonel Parker is neither as fat, nor as ugly, nor has the unidentifiable European accent that Hanks chose to deploy in this role. He chose to play the Colonel this way, and failed.

Still, Hanks is not the only problem. It’s always tricky to make a cradle-to-grave biopic (biographical picture) not feel like a book report. The need felt to portray every pivotal moment on screen leaves little room for narrative crafting, and what matters to the characters aren’t the same things that matter to viewers. It feels like this happened, then this happened, and then this happened.

Many of these moments are blown by at a breakneck pace, thanks to Luhrman’s signature filmmaking style — a flurry of quick cuts and montages and fancy editing that people might recognize from Moulin Rouge! or The Great Gatsby. His visual flair is obvious, and the movie earns its description as “lavish” in more than a few outlets. It’s beautiful, tipping toward sensory overload. I personally find that style to be exhausting, and when stretched over an interminable two hours and 40 minute runtime (WHY!), it feels more like five hours and 40 minutes.

The reason why this movie is still worth seeing, despite all that, is the lead performance of Austin Butler. Small parts in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die did not predict this star turn from the 30-year-old, who has now catapulted himself into movie star status thanks to a stunning transformation into Elvis Presley. His voice, his dancing, his presence, all of it. Matching that can’t-look-away charisma of one of the biggest stars the planet has ever known is a Herculean task that Butler somehow pulled off brilliantly.

The funny thing is that I had three different people come to me and the first thing they said was “he has to win the Oscar.” My response is…I hope not.

The Best Actor have been hijacked by imitations like this one. Five of the past 10 winners on the male side have won for stunningly accurate portrayals of significant historical figures.

Part of this is due to people who vote as support for the figure rather than the actor, which I talked about last year in my pan of Spencer, but this act of imitation is also very easy to point to as “good acting” because we have a very clear standard. Here’s the original, here’s the portrayal, side by side and boom look how accurate it is. But is that skill more valuable that someone who creates a character — their voice, their ticks, their mannerisms — whole cloth? Better than creating can’t-look-away charisma from scratch rather than standing on the shoulders of someone the audience already has a relationship to? I kind of don’t think so. (Especially in the case of Malek, and now Butler, who lip-sync to the actual super-powered voices of Freddie Mercury and Elvis.)

Butler’s embodiment of Elvis in an otherwise distracting movie manages to create value in educating youngin’s like myself on the appeal of Elvis in his prime. For that reason it’s interesting and even worth watching. It just may leave you a little cold.

---

Something New

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (Theaters): The trailer for this movie is truly confounding, because you’re thinking there’s simply no way they made a faux-documentary about an animated mollusk, right?

Well, it’s A24, so you better believe they did. And it’s the most wholesome and life-affirming piece of content I’ve seen in a long time. Think Bugs Life, but if the bugs were fully incorporated into the human world, with use of modern technology and the ability to communicate flawlessly with humans.

Marcel is a tiny ball of optimism, voiced by the excellent Jenny Slate, who approaches the unique problems of being one inch tall with an “I think I can I think I can” attitude that is infectious. Describing the plot of a movie this way, I realize it must sound insane. To be honest, it is kind of insane. But it’s not pointless or trite, like it sounds, because soon you get wrapped up in the brilliantly-constructed world and no longer bump up against its obvious ridiculousness. You care about Marcel and his family, from which he’s been separated, and at a certain point you may even fight off the stray sentimental tear…? How is that possible.

If I had to choose between a world where only movies like Elvis exist, or movies like this, honestly I’d choose Elvis. But between the two movies, there’s no question about which is better. These days, a movie that warms your heart and affirms your faith in the world is just what the doctor ordered. Recommend!

Something Old

Amadeus (1984): It would be malpractice of me to speak so reverently about this movie without fully recommending it, since it’s so rare to see someone turn a music biopic into high art. Then again, it helps when the artist has been dead hundreds of years and doesn’t have an overbearing estate to deal with.

The irony is that this movie is also two hours and forty minutes, just like Elvis, and it’s slowly paced. But when it works it works! The slow burn really gets a viewer in the skull of Salieri, Mozart’s contemporary through which we see the immense jealousy that destroys him. It’s a perch from which we can see Mozart’s genius without valorizing him, and leaves our understanding for him all the richer. If you don’t believe me, believe the EIGHT Oscars this movie won!

Something to Stream

Save Yourselves! (Hulu): One concept we’re all still discovering and coming to terms with is the idea of the “streaming movie.” These projects are meant to be enjoyed and forgotten, lacking the urgency or staying power of theater releases but also not requiring a big mental commitment at the end of a long day.

For my money, truly one of the best “streaming movies” of this era is a little unknown indie about a Brooklyn couple who go upstate to “unplug” from technology right when aliens invade the planet, unbeknownst to them. It’s a fantastic premise and it’s executed really well down to the micro level, with subtle humor and cultural commentary. I gave it a rewatch this week, my third time seeing it, and it still holds up. Here’s my full review from 2020.

---

Trailer Watch: Thirteen Lives

Hollywood insider that I am — cough cough right guys?? — I’ve actually already seen this movie (or at least an almost finished cut of it) and thought it was fantastic. From director Ron Howard, this is basically a return to the kind of tactile, plot-centric storytelling he perfected in Apollo 13. It’s an easy story to follow no matter how much or little you remember about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, where 13 children in Thailand got stranded in a cave and needed to be rescued by heroic divers (played here by Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen). You really feel like you’re in the cave with the divers and understand the impossibility of their task, which makes each scene more tense and rewarding.

I was so impressed with the movie that I’m surprised by the decision to release it on Amazon Prime Video on August 5th. I would’ve expected it to be rolled out in the fall during the festival season, then released in theaters in the fall and pushed through the awards season. Plus it’s a crowd pleaser, and even though it doesn’t have a ton of sticker appeal, I could see it picking up steam in the box office because of its wide appeal. With this August release, there’s almost no chance it’ll get awards nominations, and I’m worried that it’ll come and go without making an impact.