Tom Hanks is unfuckwithable; let’s get that right out of the way. I would say he’s the Tom Brady of actors if that comparison weren’t ludicrous on its face – Tom Brady wishes he were the Tom Hanks of football players, because Tom Hanks is beloved. And now that the shots at Tom Brady are also out of the way, I need to bring up the weird elephant still sitting in the room, that has in fact been sitting in the room ever since Baz Luhrmann’s glorious mess Elvis debuted at Cannes last May. I’m talking, of course, about Tom Hanks’ Elvis accent.
True, this topic has already had its big moment in the Discourse. But I only just now saw Elvis (for the next episode of the Antagonist Podcast – get caught up now!) and I am quite simply befuddled in a way that Tom Hanks has never befuddled me before. Tom Hanks is America’s Dad-Slash-Grandpa because he’s a thoroughly goofy and decent guy, and we pay happy attention to his goofs and decency because he’s an excellent and versatile actor. He’s played astronauts; he’s played sea captains; he’s played volcano fighters; he’s played frightened children in adult bodies and marooned firestarters and gangsters and love interests and toy cowboys and oppressed gay lawyers and all manner of other interesting roles and he’s brought them all to life with a vigor and a sensitivity that just straight-up clicks. I wouldn’t say he’s the Meryl Streep of male actors, but I would say that he’s simply beyond comparisons like that. He’s Tom Hanks! He makes you say it with a little exclamation point, like you’re running into an old friend.
So I cannot help but fixate on Hanks’ performance as Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis, which is far and away the worst of his career – the only truly bad one he’s ever turned in. Part of this is not Hanks’ fault. The script (credited to four different writers) takes the bold step of installing Parker, Elvis Presley’s real-life manager from 1955 until Presley’s death in 1977, as the film’s narrator and villain. It also gives Parker enough lines of voiceover narration to make fans of David Lynch’s Dune blanch. This is Problem #1. Voiceover narration is a poison akin to the “Drink Me” flask from Alice in Wonderland: because of the tendency to use voiceover to deliver exposition, the device almost always makes the narrator too big for the movie and distracts from the story or upends it entirely. The next time you watch a movie with a voiceover narrator, ask yourself if the events happening on-screen need any explanation or whether they would do just fine voiceover-free.
The latter is certainly true in Elvis’ case. But the bigger issue is Problem #2. I have, to put it as plainly as possible, no fucking idea what Hanks or Luhrmann were thinking when they decided that their version of Colonel Parker needed an accent that sounds like Foghorn Leghorn’s Prussian cousin getting ready to spend the wedding night with his child bride. There’s a creepily excited air to the voice; almost every scene he’s in feels as though Parker just left something illicit and delightful in the other room and he can’t wait to get back to it. There’s also a supremely vague, European-y quality to the accent – the real-life Parker was Dutch by birth, though he came to America permanently at 19 and lived here until his death at 87; Hanks’ Parker could be Dutch, or maybe he’s supposed to be French, unless he’s German; there’s a definite Romanian air in there, too, and if you’d told me he was supposed to be Swedish or Danish or Swiss I’d have believed that, too.
And it’s not just that the accent is terrible. (Though it is. It’s really, really bad.) It’s both of the above problems combined: Tom Hanks is a master actor who has a shitload of lines in this movie, and he delivers every single one of them in a voice that keeps you from believing that you are listening to a character in a story. Never for a second do you forget that you are watching Tom Hanks. In this case, that you are watching Tom Hanks eat a volume of ham sufficient to supply an Easter weekend block party. This is the kind of artistic decision I can’t believe Hanks and Luhrmann both signed off on. If you told your father you were thinking about traveling abroad and your father started talking to you in this voice, you would order him to stop. In that sense, then, Elvis is a 159-minute conversation you’re not upset by the subject matter of, but that you really don’t want to have.
But then here’s Problem #3, which I didn’t realize was a problem until after the movie (and which I suspect most viewers wouldn’t either). The real Tom Parker did not sound like that. At all! At all. I went looking for the sound of his voice expecting to find a cackling old Dutch trickster leaning heavy on his affricates and voiceless velar plosives. Instead, I found a voice not unlike that of my wife’s grandfather, who had the actual southern upbringing that Parker claimed for himself his whole life:
Then, thinking maybe Parker’s accent had become more southern or generally American later in his life, I went looking for older interviews. But in this one, recorded in 1956, Parker sounds even more southern – he claimed to be from Huntington, West Virginia, and I readily acknowledge I can hear how he got away with the lie for so long.
(I also found a home video from 1987 in which Parker, sitting with fans from the Netherlands, speaks a little Dutch. This video appears in a few articles claiming his “Dutch” accent is closer to what we hear Hanks speak in the film. Feel free to judge for yourself; I don’t think he sounds any different here than in the previous two videos.)
For some mysterious reason, then, Hanks committed to an accent that he couldn’t do well when he didn’t need an accent at all. Parker didn’t have much of one, and I’m willing to bet that somewhere between 70 and 90% of Elvis‘ audience couldn’t have told you what he sounded like anyway. This movie is a gigantic explosion of joy and color, music and melodrama, tragedy and love right out of the Baz Luhrmann playbook. The fact that it’s also a wonky-ass misstep from Tom Hanks does make it that much more interesting, though not in the way the filmmaker probably hoped.
