Many films have been made about Elvis Presley,
but Baz Luhrmann's 2022 biopic is the first to tackle the King's lonely final years.
Baz Luhrmann's elaborate, often anachronistic visual panache always gets a lot of attention,
whether he's depicting 1890s Paris or 1920s New York. Elvis is no exception, with its whirling
roulette wheel camerawork and hip hop remixes of Presley songs. But the film's most daring conceit
is arguably the way it tells the story of Elvis from the vantage point of Colonel Tom Parker,
played by Tom Hanks under a mountain of prosthetics and a thick Dutch accent.
Parker looks back on his life with The King as he lies dying in a Vegas hospital bed in 1997,
wandering through a spectral casino as the memories come flooding back.
"I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley."
Over the years since Presley's death, Parker has widely come to be seen as a villain,
manipulating his one and only client's trust and taking far more than his share of the profits.
Luhrmann's film doesn't disagree with this version of the facts, but in Parker's mind
he is Elvis' other half, the carnival barker to his sideshow freak, the snowman to his showman.
"Col. Tom Parker was a carny, pure and simple."
The film's most compelling tension is between the blameless, almost victimized way Parker
sees his own relationship with Elvis compared with what we the audience see
happening on screen. This tension is exposed early in the film with a brief flash to 1974,
when Elvis collapses backstage before a concert and Parker makes it perfectly
clear that the only thing that matters is that he gets back on his feet and performs.
As the film enters its final act, we revisit that moment in 1974 when Presley collapses
with added context. At this point, Elvis has been performing at the International Hotel
in Las Vegas for years due to the fact that Parker signed him into essentially a lifetime
contract in exchange for the forgiveness of Parker's massive gambling debts.
"If I was you, I would book him for a hundred years."
"Well, no better time than the present."
Parker has also been promising Presley his first global tour,
going back to the 1968 comeback special, only to continually delay the start of the tour for one
reason or another. The truth finally comes to light just moments before The King collapses:
Parker keeps delaying the tour because he came to the United States illegally
and doesn't have a passport. His name isn't even Tom Parker, nor was he ever a colonel.
"But I hear rumors that Colonel is an alien."
After his collapse, Presley is given a shot of amphetamines to get him up and going again for
the show. He takes the stage, inebriated and incensed by his manager's betrayal,
and in spectacularly dramatic fashion, fires Parker in the middle of his performance.
"You are fired. You are fired. You're fired!"
It's a deeply satisfying moment, even if it is nothing more than a fantasy. According to Elvis
biographer Alanna Nash, Presley and Parker's professional falling out occurred after a show,
not in the midst of one, and for a completely different reason. Furthermore, Parker's immigrant
status wouldn't come to light until after Presley's death; there is no evidence that The
King ever suspected that Parker was anyone other than the West Virginia native he claimed to be.
Parker's countermove, however, is accurate to real life. After being fired by Presley,
Parker retires to his office and drafts an invoice for unpaid promotional work dating back to 1955,
totaling over $8 million. According to Nash, this is based on a real incident,
though the exact dollar amount of the invoice is unknown. Elvis'
father Vernon breaks the news to his son that Parker's bill would bankrupt them.
"We're gonna lose Graceland."
Elvis, furious, storms out of his suite, only to find Parker waiting for him outside.
The two men argue viciously. Elvis gnashes teeth and threatens to kill Parker;
the Colonel in turn belittles Presley's career, reminding him, unfairly but honestly,
that the comeback special audience that loved him so much was a plant, prompted to cheer by
a flashing "applause" sign. The scene is in many ways the climax of the film, and Butler
and Hanks give it their all. Hanks delivers the film's theme in this scene, declaring,
"We are the same, you and I. We are two odd lonely children, reaching for eternity."
His entreaty falls on deaf ears as Elvis walks out of the Colonel's life forever.
The film fades to black with a title card: "One Year Later." Suddenly it's 1975 and Elvis is
now a media curiosity, a real-life version of the sideshow act Parker always considered him to be.
"The colonel dressed up the hotel like a carnival. There were posters,
teddy bears, and hound dogs all over the place."
He's gained weight. He's separated from his wife Priscilla and rarely sees his daughter
Lisa Marie. And when he's not performing in Las Vegas he's holed up like a hermit
at Graceland. There is one glimmer of hope, as talks are apparently ongoing to have him
star with Barbra Streisand in a remake of A Star is Born, but we know it will never come to be.
On the tarmac alongside the private jet he named after his daughter, Elvis and
Priscilla have a tender conversation. Like most of the dialogue in the film,
its primary focus is to establish for us the state of Elvis' life and career in this moment,
and what his dreams and goals are. Elvis still wants to make one good movie, after dozens of
cheap musicals, and worries that nothing he's done will amount to anything when he dies.
"Nobody's gonna remember me. I've never done anything lasting."
The film presents this as Elvis' final conversation with his ex-wife, although,
in reality, he would live for another two years.
From that scene on the tarmac, the film skips ahead two years to the announcement that Presley
has been found dead in Graceland at age 42. Rather than try to recreate the spectacle of
Elvis' funeral procession or the massive outpouring of public grief that followed,
Luhrmann uses archival footage of the real thing. He also includes an audio excerpt
from President Jimmy Carter's statement on Presley's death, in which he said,
Not too shabby for a kid who scandalized the nation just two decades earlier.
In choosing not to recreate Elvis' funeral, the film also skips over the
fact that Parker reportedly wore a Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap to the service and,
while there, tried to strike deals with mourners, according to biographer James
Dickerson. We'll never know whether his behavior came out of callousness, sociopathy, denial,
or some misguided sense of showmanship, just to keep everyone talking about him.
Butler up as the so-called "fat Elvis," but here the young actor is decked out in wide
pair of jowls and double chin, mumbling and stumbling as he sits down at the piano and
belts out an emotional rendition of the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody."
Sweat pouring down his face, the camera stays tight on Butler in an intimate,
slightly uncomfortable way. It's different from the way any of the film's previous musical numbers
have been shot, but soon we understand the reason why, as Luhrmann cuts from Butler as Elvis to
footage of The King himself singing, accompanied by a short montage of the real-life Elvis in many
of the situations we've seen dramatized in the film. It's an emotionally affecting transition,
as we see just how accurately Luhrmann and Butler have recreated so many moments in Presley's life.
It's also a reminder of just how powerful Elvis' voice and presence were, even in his final days.
He gives a showstopper performance at that piano, and the audience hangs on every note. We still do.
In the end, Elvis can't speak for himself, so Parker does it for him, as he did for most of
their life together. Parker ponders who or what killed Elvis as he shuffles about his purgatorial
casino floor in a hospital gown, dragging an IV pole. It wasn't the pills and drugs,
administered by doctors who should have known better, enabled by Parker, Vernon, and Presley's
whole entourage, the so-called "Memphis Mafia," who were all complicit in working Elvis to death.
"What can you do for him, Dr. Nick?"
And it wasn't Parker's greed and mismanagement of Elvis' business,
which forced him to continue performing at an unforgiving pace for years;
Parker is all too quick to absolve himself of that responsibility.
"I didn't kill him.
I made Elvis Presley."
No, of course, it's we who killed Elvis, with our relentless love for him and his inability to
say no. Parker's monologue here is a fascinating moment in the film; Luhrmann and Hanks keep Col.
Parker at arm's length, unwilling to tell the audience how we should feel about him. Instead,
they let the dying Dutch carny, the "snowman," snow us to the very end.
After the screen fades to black, we get a series of post-scripts filling us in on how the saga
of Elvis and the Colonel played out in the years after Presley's death. The film takes liberties in
regard to what Presley and the rest of the world knew about Parker's background. In real life,
it would be 1980 before it would be confirmed that Parker was of Dutch descent and entered
the country illegally as a 30-year-old man. Eventually, though, Parker's financial malfeasance
would come to light, and, in 1982, after a series of lawsuits filed by Elvis Presley Enterprises,
a judge ruled that Parker had no legal claim to any part of the Presley estate.
In his final two decades, Parker spent his days in Las Vegas, puttering around one casino floor
or another, pouring his immense wealth down the drain. He made few public appearances or
statements, emerging from the shadows only on rare occasions such as the 1993 release of the
Elvis postage stamp. Presley, meanwhile, far from the forgotten lounge singer he feared he'd become,
remains an international superstar nearly 50 years after his death, and one of the highest-earning
dead celebrities of all time. His life and work still inspire admiration and controversy.