When combined with a gaudy cinematography style that emphasizes Vegas, carnivals and a whole lot of red, the Parker thing becomes weirdly eerie. He’s not actually a colonel, nor is his name actually Tom Parker, and he’s surrounded by an air of sinister mystery for the duration of the film that is never fully explained. Parker, played by a barely recognizable Tom Hanks with a strange accent, a bloated figure and a lot of makeup, is written and played as a kind of mystical character. The choice to center the story around Presley’s relationship with Parker was a good one in theory - it had the potential to add new details to the Elvis story we already know - but in practice, it falls flat. The film aligns with the classic biopic birth to death structure but deviates by making Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker the star of the show, not Presley. Presley is not presented as a perfect person by any means, but these problematic aspects of his character are still largely swept under the rug in the film.

Presley’s racial appropriation of music, perhaps, or his abuse of his wife and sexual escapades with underage girls could’ve been explored here but weren’t. A big-screen biopic is the perfect opportunity to bring things up, and Luhrmann didn’t take it. Presley had some problems, to say the least, and in this film, they don’t come to light in the way they should. The film, in many places, makes you think more about what it could’ve been than what it is because there’s a lot that goes unsaid. Luhrmann does add color here and there, and it’s still a highly enjoyable watch - mainly for Austin Butler's performance as Presley, an excellent soundtrack and fantastic period costumes - but ultimately, “Elvis” falls short in expanding on the star’s life. Baz Luhrmann, the famed director of “The Great Gatsby” (2013) and “Moulin Rouge!” (2001), takes a whopping two hours and 39 minutes to tell us what could have mostly been gleaned from a five-minute skim of Presley’s Wikipedia page.

From his impoverished childhood in rural Mississippi where he discovered music, his adolescence in Memphis where he frequented Beale Street to his rise to stardom and subsequent crash and burn, “Elvis” takes us through the whole Elvis Presley story, but doesn’t add much to it. “Elvis” (2022) is, in a word, captivating.

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