'Elvis' Is a Wikipedia Entry Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Agood-enough story can withstand more or less any direction, and that’s the extent of the artistic success that Baz Luhrmann achieves with “Elvis.” The rise of a Memphis truck driver to a generational hero and a world icon, under the thumb of his Mephistophelian manager, and his fall to the status of a mere self-destructive celebrity who became an object of nostalgia while still young is amazing enough, in its arc and its details, to hold attention even in the course of a garish and simplistic two hours and thirty-nine minutes. “Elvis” is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; it’s a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presley’s authentic tragedy.