CANNES, France — Elvis Presley famously never got the overseas touring career he deserved. He played only three venues outside the U.S., all of them in Canada in 1957, well before reaching peak superstardom. Instead of going international, he remained a fixture of the International Hotel in Las Vegas from 1969 to 1976, performing show after sold-out show until just a year before his death. Keeping Presley tied to Vegas was just one of the many machinations of his ruthlessly exploitative manager, Col. Tom Parker, who, it's now widely believed, was afraid to leave the U.S. after having immigrated there illegally from the Netherlands years earlier.
That sad history is unpacked at some length in "Elvis," Baz Luhrmann's unsurprisingly extravagant new movie about Presley's life, art and career, which had its world premiere Wednesday night at the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival. (Warner Bros. will release the film June 24 in U.S. theaters.) Presley may never have gotten to perform for his fans in France, but Cannes gladly rolled out the red carpet for Luhrmann and his stars, Austin Butler, who makes a credibly charismatic Elvis, and Tom Hanks, who makes Col. Parker every inch the self-serving scumbag. Defensive and self-pitying, Parker narrates this long and gaudily overstuffed tale of a King and his Kingmaker, arguing — unpersuasively — that he isn't the villain that history has made him out to be.
The problem is that while Parker is very much the villain of "Elvis," Luhrmann has also gone out of his way to make him something of a co-protagonist. Ordinarily I like it when Hanks cuts against the good-guy grain, but his work here is hammy, grating and unmodulated to a fault, accomplished with a combo of fat suit, prosthetic jowls and over-the-top accent that makes Colin Farrell's Penguin and Stellan Skarsgard's Baron Von Harkonnen look positively restrained. It also adds unnecessary narrative padding to a movie that clocks in north of 2 1/2 hours, and which would earn more of that running time if it weren't repeatedly forcing its ostensible subject to share his spotlight.
