Elvis Told The Wrong Story - And Hurt The Movie
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.
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