Josephine (Gloria)’s review published on Letterboxd:
Walk Hard looks at the base of the music biopic to perceive its inherent absurdity, you look at the recreation of someone’s life and everything you see are fragments derived from an easy narratology, a life turn into a literal joke where neither time or place matter as much as progressing towards the next narrative beat that can give to the audience a false equation of these people. It turns a complex life of highs and lows into pure meaningless jargon.
Elvis is about that and who this narrative serve in the long run. Its catharsis is fake as much as what is perceived of the impact of Elvis in the culture. It’s about what is not tell or reduced to, the projection of a producer who views the victories and failures of the artist he shaped as his own and the inevitability of looking at that image fade as one slowly succumbs to what remains of those memories. The recurrent image of political figures getting assasinated or dying without exploring their impact while pop figures rise stops translating the drama into an explanation of Elvis as an individual and becomes into a sign of Elvis' own ideals dying when assimilated by the industry that conceived him.
Sometimes it can be too satisfied in its own redundancy for my taste, but at least Luhrmann understands how derivative its intentions are that the moment he goes back to all these similar hotel rooms, all these hospital spaces with the same view of Las Vegas, all these concert scenes delivered as trailers of the same scene we are watching at the moment and overexposed over real footage with no attempt to differentiate from the fabrications made by the film (should have throw Warhol's Double Elvis to make matters more complicated), for a brief moment, it surpasses its contrivances to fully accept that beyond the artifice, it feels more (in)human that it has any right to be.
At the end, it was good story to sell.
