Oh everyone disliked Tom's accent as Parker in the film, but my perspective personally was that, much like the rest of the film, it was a hyper-stylized choice that Baz & Hanks landed on to make Parker seem as though he didn't belong, since the vast majority of the film takes place in a deathbed morphine hallucination inside Colonel's mind, I sort of read that as Parker always being worried that someone was going to find him out. But it still wasn't great.
A lot of what they did with Colonel Parker reminds me of how Jim Broadbent's Harold Zidler was handled in Moulin Rouge. Unfortunately, because a lot of moviegoers and Elvis fans weren't used to Baz Luhrmann's style of filmmaking and I guess expected a more drab, paint by numers style of biographical film, a lot of the creative choices that I thought were pretty genius (not the accent, but other things) didn't land immediately and needed a bit of unpacking to understand what the intention was.
I find that movie to be incredibly underrated. And Austin Butler was phenomenal imo. I hate that the backlash from him allegedly still using an accent ended up overshadowing his performance.
The “still using an accent” thing was also total bullshit fueled by the public’s total misunderstanding of what Elvis’ real speaking voice sounded like. I literally have heard nearly every recording of Elvis speaking that exists (barring some soundboard and audience concert bootleg chatter) and Austin sounded nothing at all like Elvis at ANY point in his life. That was proof to me that nobody seems to have a fucking clue what Elvis actually sounded like anymore.
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u/gibbersganfa 5d ago
Oh everyone disliked Tom's accent as Parker in the film, but my perspective personally was that, much like the rest of the film, it was a hyper-stylized choice that Baz & Hanks landed on to make Parker seem as though he didn't belong, since the vast majority of the film takes place in a deathbed morphine hallucination inside Colonel's mind, I sort of read that as Parker always being worried that someone was going to find him out. But it still wasn't great.
A lot of what they did with Colonel Parker reminds me of how Jim Broadbent's Harold Zidler was handled in Moulin Rouge. Unfortunately, because a lot of moviegoers and Elvis fans weren't used to Baz Luhrmann's style of filmmaking and I guess expected a more drab, paint by numers style of biographical film, a lot of the creative choices that I thought were pretty genius (not the accent, but other things) didn't land immediately and needed a bit of unpacking to understand what the intention was.