So, I mentioned to my mother in a text that while I had mixed feelings about Elvis 2022 and hadn’t planned on watching it despite, having been raised on a steady diet of classic rock, I just wasn’t an Elvis fan, I’d loved a few things about the movie--partly the Beale Street Scenes and partially the cinematography, but absolutely became enamored with Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis. I only knew him as “that lanky guy who dated Vanessa Hudgens” before this but he’s a wonderful actor. It makes me regret not going up to New York to watch him, Denzel Washington, and David Morse in the Iceman Cometh.
My mother? She’s an older mother and Tom Hanks’s age and took a friend who’s fifteen years older than she is to see it, and her friend was a young girl when he broke out and was a fan of his for the entirety of his career and said Austin Butler nailed it. Her friend also cried watching it.
I asked my mom, as an actor, wondering what my my mom, who also used to act before her health problems cancelled it out, what she thought.
She said, “The boy was wonderful, but for a weird reason I can’t stop remembering Tom Hanks.”
I went, “Did you like him in this?”
Her response: “I don’t know?”
*Personally I didn’t like Tom Hanks in this movie. I think that the biggest tell was that I forgot entirely what Elvis looked like and that Austin Butler was acting, but never forgot I was watching Tom Hanks in a fatsuit and prosthetics.*
She said she started crying a the end when an exhausted and heavily medicated Elvis steps up to his piano after his weight has fluctuated a lot and the press has mocked him for his weight gain and for his very obvious growing drug addiction, but he plays Unchained Melody beautifully. His voice sounds great and the intent is there. Then it cuts to the actual Elvis Presley giving a bashful smile when everyone applauds and, for my mom, it broke her. She said, “It’s that for a moment, the years and the addiction and the wear-and-tear-vanish and he’s giving this sweet, infectious smile and he looks for a moment like a young man with hope.”
