I love films about music legends such as Marley, Walk the Line, and Ray *because the soundtrack is guaranteed to be excellent. So I could not wait to see *Elvis. It starts out strong but pretty soon it fails to create the magic of great movies that pull you in and make you believe what you see is a real story. Baz Luhrmann, who wrote and directed the film, never lets you forget that the film and Elvis’s true life are different.

Maybe he thought that this is very clever because Elvis in his last decade lived a life that most of us would consider “artificial.” I was disappointed because one could have done so much more with the biographical material of Elvis—explain how he developed his craft and help us understand more how a person who never wrote any songs could become the biggest-selling solo artist of all time. In the film Elvis does not rehearse once. Every song spontaneously comes out of him, sometimes years after he first heard the song. You also do not come to trust the emotions for example, between Elvis and his mother or Elvis and Priscilla. The saving grace of the film is the performance of Austin Butler as Elvis. He is so in command of his face that you often believe you are watching the real Elvis. Nominating him for best actor at the Oscars makes sense. Nominating the film for the best film does not.