This column is not about trashing Tom Hanks in “Elvis.”
How Tom Hanks sounds in “Elvis” was very likely not up to Tom Hanks. Neither was the physical presentation of his character, which is the topic here today: the distraction problem when prosthetics intrude on performance.
Before you see Hanks’ rendition of Colonel Tom Parker on screen, you hear the deathbed version of Elvis Presley’s longtime manager and exploiter in voice-over, speaking in a doggerel Dutch accent. It’s unlocatably, generically foreign, processed through a deceptive character’s years in America and various parts of the Deep South. Theoretically it’s an intriguing choice. But filmmaking is theory put into practice, molded by what the director Vincente Minnelli once called “a hundred or more hidden things,” sometimes hiding in plain sight.
