Reseñas de la crítica

A bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler... But in that signature Luhrmann way, [the film] veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it.

Elvis is a turned-up-to-11 treat... It’s a riotously audacious work, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the king of rock’n’roll and his puppet-master promoter.

Elvis, in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a brash, overwhelming experience. It’s a carnival in movie form: a grand, restless, swirling contraption that’s as grotesque as any bloody-mouthed geek and as uncomfortably poignant as a sad clown. It’s too much. Yet if it were any less excessive, it wouldn’t be as doggedly effective as it often is.

Elvis meanders and mesmerizes not because it’s a great film about Presley but because it’s a fascinating one about the feeling of being at the side of greatness, trying to desperately harness yourself to it in some way with the understanding that you could at any time be left behind.

While you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale.

Butler inhabits the role of Elvis Presley the way Jim Carrey reincarnated Andy Kaufman. It’s astonishing watching the former Nickelodeon star practically slip on Presley’s skin and operate his voice box, doing most of the vocals himself. Most importantly, he reveals the man swiveling those hips.

Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

At the center of Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling pop epic “Elvis,” a film as opulent and outsize as the King’s talent and taste, Butler delivers a fully transformed, fully committed and star-making turn... “Elvis” isn’t just a reinvigoration of the Elvis myth. It’s also a resurrection of the King himself.

Luhrmann’s cut-and-paste job of covering Elvis’ career falls somewhere between “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which pretended it was telling the real Freddie Mercury story but did nothing of the sort, and “Rocketman,” which told you up front that it was going to turn Elton John’s story into a fantasia. You get the feeling that Luhrmann might have liked to go further in the fantasia direction... instead, he settles for big, charged musical sequences and a host of lies of varying sizes.

In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice... “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to [Presley himself], as if for the first time.

[Elvis] doesn’t so much win you over as hammer you into submission. It dumps you into a sealed drum, blasts hysterically re-edited versions of the familiar music into that sealed space and rattles it furiously until you pass out or — ears bleeding — give in to the benevolent torture and confess everything.

That Presley’s career became a paradigm of overindulgence and kitsch should not have been taken as creative guidance by Mr. Luhrmann. Yet here we are: The editing is like a kaleidoscope fed through a food processor, the camera has less ability to sit still than a 4-year-old stuffed with birthday cake, and both lead actors veer into camp.