In 'Elvis,' an icon remains an icon, and little else
The conundrum facing every biopic about an extremely famous person – the kind of person who truly represents that now overused and diluted term "icon" – is in teasing the human out from underneath all that iconography. Beyond nailing the "look" or "sound," however one might interpret it, does this figure who's been referenced, impersonated, and memed ad nauseum feel like a real person again? Does the exercise result in a better understanding and/or appreciation of their work and what made them iconic in the first place?
A lot of biopics have trouble solving this conundrum. And few, if any, can fully avoid falling into hagiography, which is probably the, director and co-screenwriter Baz Luhrmann's dizzyingly absurd take on the life of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), doesn't just fail at making the so-called King of Rock and Roll into a three-dimensional human being; it actively plunges him further into the recesses of memedom, while making his legacy out to be far less interesting than it actually is.
