Please stop making music biopics, it’s 2022
Months ago, I complained on this website that Ridley Scott’s evident disinterest in fashion left his 2021 film House of Gucci an underwhelming mess. He may be a great director in a technical sense, but if Scott wasn’t going to treat the material he’d been given with the reverence it deserved, he wasn’t qualified to tell the story of the fashion giant Gucci.
By contrast, in the case of Baz Lurhmann’s recent biopic centering the life and career of Elvis Presley, I can’t think of any auteur more apt for the job. On occasion, some critics may lobby the phrase “style over substance” at Luhrmann’s work, but I reject the idea that style can’t contain substance within itself. The filmmaking of Elvis is a wonderful example, as Lurhmann’s penchant for gaudy Americana aesthetics emphasizes the ostentatious persona of a musician still officiating Las Vegas weddings more than 40 years postmortem. Visual excess is what Lurhmann does best, meaning no one is more qualified to hone the flashy-bordering-on-tacky essence of “The King of Rock and Roll” and his ever-lasting legacy.
Unfortunately, even the most substantively stylish storytelling can’t carry a feature-length film on its own without a sturdy foundation to adorn. Before going into the film, I was already annoyed by my (correct) assumption that the story as told by Lurhmann would neglect to explore all the more uncomfortable aspects of Elvis Presley’s life and career. Coming out, I was even more aggravated to have discovered that it neglected to explore everything else as well.
The film encounters various different motifs throughout its 2-hour-and-40-minute runtime, but it never slows down long enough to let any theme develop fully. Is it a story about how artists born into privilege profit from the cultural expressions of marginalized communities? Not really. The movie at least reminds its audience that Elvis Presley followed the lead of black artists, but it doesn’t care to explore how Elvis’s success contrasted that of the musicians he imitated. Is it a love story between Elvis Presley and his iconic ex-wife, Priscilla? Definitely not, Priscilla’s hardly in the film, and if she’d had more screentime, the filmmakers would have to acknowledge that she was 14 while being courted by her 24-year-old future husband.
At most, Elvis is the story of how a sweet, innocent kid from Memphis, Tennessee, got taken advantage of by a svengali-type manager who bled his client’s estate dry. However, even that narrative arch is lacking. Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis’s manager played by Tom Hanks) narrates the film, giving his perspective precedent, but Elvis the movie still attempts to dramatize the story of Elvis the person. The Colonel isn’t present enough for the audience to follow the mechanics of his exploitation scheme, and yet Elvis’s personal journey is constantly interrupted by Parker’s clumsy exposition.
The basic structure of the film is itself flawed, but a biopic such as this rarely succeeds in the ways it should.
In college, I decided my one true calling as a film-major (besides to become absolutely unbearable as all film-majors must) was to write the film adaptation of the life and career of Britney Spears. I’m very far from making that dream a reality, but I have a rough outline for how I’d handle Brit’s story (if you see this, girl, call me), and much of my plan has been influenced by the catastrophic failure that would premiere on the Lifetime channel about a year after I made a Britney screenplay my new life goal: Britney Ever After, the unauthorized made-for-TV biopic of Britney Jean Spears.
There are many reasons Britney Ever After is an insult to the legacy of our Princess of Pop, ranging from a failure to secure licensing rights for any of Britney’s songs, a wardrobe that could barely compete with most Britney Halloween costumes, and the strange decision to depict a dance-battle that almost certainly never happened in real life. The most obvious reason, though, is that it’s a two-hour film (or less when you factor in ad breaks), that attempts to cover the entire history of one of the world’s most influential popstars and her two-decades-spanning career.
Biopics like Elvis and Britney Ever After, along with others from the last five years like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody, frustratingly take a cradle-to-the-grave approach while telling the story of the legendary musicians they spotlight. Even if they don’t start at the star’s literal birth, many filmmakers seem to believe that a biopic is necessarily an origin story of success, thus they start their films prior to an artist’s breakthrough into the mainstream. Britney Ever After is even somewhat unique in that it begins right after the premiere of “…Baby One More Time” and not prior to Britney’s record deal, but that still leaves the film a good ten years to cover until its conclusion sometime after the inception of Brit’s conservatorship.
Sometimes this life-spanning approach can work. The 1997 film, Selena, based on the life and career of singer Selena Quintanilla Pérez, isn’t innovative within the genre at all, but the circumstances of its real-life subject prevent it from sprawling into narrative chaos as Elvis does. As an artist, Selena was known primarily within the Latino community. The singer also died tragically at the young age of 23. The film Selena is, therefore, able to focus on a relatively short span of time from Selena’s childhood up until her death, and the fact that Selena’s audience came dominantly from one ethnic community motivates the story to emphasize her connection with her own cultural heritage.
The recent film, Rocketman, does what it can with the same basic outline, following singer-songwriter Elton John from childhood until well beyond his initial success as a musician. The timeline spans decades, but Elton’s personal journey is weighted by three major motifs that help structure his on-screen narrative: his tumultuous relationship with his family, his struggle to be accepted as a gay man, and his lifelong battle with substance abuse. For that, Rocketman is primarily a story about one man’s mental health, soundtracked by a collection of songs that aid the story and give audiences a touchstone to contextualize Elton’s iconic career.
Even with Rocketman being mostly successful as a biopic, its adherence to a tired formula does its groundbreaking subject a disservice. Why sit through scenes in which Elton is still vying for a record deal when the audience is keenly aware he’s going to become one of the biggest recording artists of his generation? There are other plots to explore, especially the ones regarding his personal relationships, his increasing dependence on drugs, or his reckoning with his own sexuality. Of course, his rise to the top is of significant weight in the Elton John story, but when you cram an entire human being’s complex life into the run-time of a feature-length film, it gets hard to balance an emotional journey with all the career milestones you know the story must hit for viewers to follow the train of events.
This is the biggest issue Elvis, along with other music biopics, runs into. Baz Lurhmann has indicated that there remains a four-hour cut of the film, but even that isn’t enough time to chronicle every important moment of Elvis Presley’s life and still leave room for the on-screen characters to feel like real people rather than impersonators of real public figures. If you want to see Elvis achieve success, fall in love with Priscilla, be exploited by the music industry, develop addictions and bad habits, then watch his marriage fall apart before he meets an untimely death, you can see the new Lurhmann film and witness all those things being referenced. If you want to really feel the emotional weight of any of that, though, or you just want to understand the cultural impact of Elvis Presley and not be told his accomplishments via voice-over, Lurhmann’s latest work won’t satisfy you as he lets his film be constrained by the trappings of a cradle-to-grave biopic that filmmakers should have moved past by now.
There are two easy fixes for this structural problem in biopics: 1) filmmakers can isolate their stories to one or a few key moments in an artist’s life to spotlight. This is done well in the 2015 biopic, Love and Mercy, which explores the life of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson by interweaving two major periods in his life: the time around the making of the Pet Sounds album, when Brian’s mental health struggles were becoming more prominent, and the period following his subsequent mental breakdown, when he became victim to his own therapist’s abuse. Or 2) directors can just be the showrunners for a goddamn mini-series.
It’s 2022, we’re far past the period in which the “silver screen” is seen as the only way to make a serious piece of audio-visual art. Some of the greatest stories of the 21st century come in the form of television shows, like Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, etc. And many of the most acclaimed TV shows of the last decade have been platformed on streaming services, like Fleabag, Stranger Things, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.
Baz Luhrmann is clearly not averse to the world of the streaming series considering his involvement in The Get Down on Netflix. So why are he and so many others still trying to squeeze real-life stories that span decades into films that span somewhere under three hours?
Whoever the real culprit is–whether it’s the executives and production companies funding projects, the producers overseeing the spending within a project’s budget, or the on-set filmmakers who are ignoring or simply failing to advocate for the avenues of presentation that work in a project’s best interest–it seems that key members of the film and television industries have forgotten that the winning formulas Hollywood’s relied on for decades to create a smash-hit success are increasingly irrelevant in the rapidly evolving ecosystem of popular entertainment.
For the next batch of people putting together music biopics, I beg of you: don’t waste 2.5 hours of my time just trying to hit as many milestones as you can. Utilize the tens of hours of my time that I’m willing to sacrifice for a compelling story, and think beyond the blockbuster format.