No one makes a splash quite like Baz Luhrmann. Trouble is, that splash is so shallow it barely breaks the surface.

Baz is the King of Bling, the Bedazzler of cinema. His movies are all flash and tinsel. They are noisy, frenetic, hyperactive triumphs of spectacle over substance, and people just love them.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m delighted to see his Elvis sitting at the top of the Australian box office. I’m delighted too that he keeps making these big, bold, expensive movies, and that they keep succeeding, because they play a key role in proving the Australian film industry belongs on the world stage. Sure, it’s not the only gauge that matters, but Hollywood has taken notice of Australia in no small part because of what Baz (and George Miller) have consistently done in this country, on their own terms.

The king of bling: Director Baz Luhrmann at the London premier of Elvis last month.Credit:AP

But the films themselves … well, there my taste diverges from the popular to a pretty significant degree. Elvis is a bit of a mess. The Great Gatsby was a bit of a mess. Moulin Rouge with its pop-song mash-ups was a bit of a mess. And Australia was the mother of all messes. Only Strictly Ballroom – which was no less razzle-dazzle than the others, but was a breath of fresh air when it landed – and Romeo + Juliet, a perfectly judged marriage of MTV aesthetic and hyperinflated teen emotion to Shakespeare’s text, stand apart.

Baz has a vision, of that there is no doubt. But that vision is largely about how things look (and really, it seems only right to acknowledge the role his production and costume designer wife Catherine Martin plays here; not for nothing has her work won four Oscars). And often that look is a pastiche of looks that have gone before.

Australia is indebted to the newsreels of the era in which it is set, the 1930s and ’40s, to Jedda and its conflicting myths of the dangerous and the noble savage, to Chips Rafferty droving cattle across the dry plains in The Sundowners. It grapples with our shameful past – poisoned waterholes, the Stolen Generations, child sexual abuse by the clergy, entrenched sexism and racism in every walk of life – by mobilising shorthand images and gestures that are no more original than the film’s recurring motif of the wizened Aboriginal man standing on one leg against a vast landscape. It may be an efficient mode of storytelling, but it feels gestural, empty.

The Great Gatsby: Too much razzle-dazzle is barely enough. Credit:Village Roadshow

Baz’s take on The Great Gatsby was hailed as a visual feast, but I felt like I’d been force-fed OTT imagery so my liver could be turned into pate. F Scott Fitzgerald’s slim book was a precision-targeted attack on excess, but that’s Baz’s stock-in-trade. So instead of framing Jay Gatsby’s spectacular parties as things of horror and wanton waste, he could only wonder how to eke yet more dazzle out of all that razzle.

Elvis is more of the same. Even before it’s begun the screen has exploded in a riot of CGI jewels to form the Warner Bros logo. The first 20 minutes is a mess of noise and hyperactive camerawork, as if some hyperactive kid had gone hard at the red cordial then set out to make a movie. When Baz wants to convey the idea that Elvis’s twin influences were gospel music and the blues, he has him as a young kid literally running back and forth between a church and a honky tonk, between rapture and the ravishing of the flesh. It’s nuts.

Luhrmann directs his biopic as if it were an action movie. There’s scant dialogue, and even when Austin Butler’s Elvis does talk it’s with such a mumbled drawl that it’s almost impossible to work out what he’s saying. Priscilla is mostly just set decoration, a shameful waste of the talents of young Aussie actress Olivia DeJonge. Only Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) gets much chance to breathe, though audiences might wish they could stop him. He is just the latest in a long line of Luhrmann’s pantomime villains.

Where the film does excel is on stage, and almost entirely through acts of Elvis defying Parker: at a 1956 concert in Memphis where he provokes a riot with his hips; at the recording of his 1968 Christmas special, where he redefines himself as a protest singer; at his first Las Vegas concert, where he reframes his massive rock’n’roll legacy through a gospel lens. It’s stunning stuff.

The real Elvis Presley, and Austin Butler in a recreation of the 1968 Christmas television special for Baz Luhrmann’s movie.

Baz isn’t much interested in deep dives into motivation or psyche or character. In his world, what you see is what you get. There is only surface, everything else is irrelevant. A little less conversation, a little more action, please.

In a sense, he is the ultimate postmodern filmmaker, slicing and dicing the past to create assemblages that glitter and shine with apparent meaning but really offer little beyond the facade. I don’t think it amounts to great filmmaking, but millions of people would disagree with me – and in the business of show, it’s their view that counts, not mine.

As the mixed-blood Indigenous boy Nullah says at the end of Australia, “One thing I know: Why we tell stories is the most important of all. That’s how you keep them people belonging, always.”

If belonging means turning up, it’s fair to say Baz knows it too.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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