Let Him Speak!

Applauding Austin Butler.

Austin Butler at the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/FilmMagic)

When Austin Butler won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama last week, his speech was rather unmemorable. He thanked Denzel Washington, for recommending him to his Elvis director Baz Luhrmann — but really more people should be thanking Denzel just generally — and thanked Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt. Couldn’t he have thanked them when he was working on Once Upon A Time dot dot dot In Hollywood? Whatever. During his speech, everyone became an authority on how Austin Butler is supposed to sound. Which is to say: many people on the internet pointed out that his voice has become demonstrably less like someone from California and more like Elvis Presley’s. But I am not one to block my blessings: let him cook!

I’ve said my piece about Elvis before: it is glorious and maximalist and lush. It is also a bloated and strange and hagiographic. The movie gets bogged down by a bad Tom Hanks performance; Doja Cat will not be nominated for an Oscar she deserves to win for “Vegas.” But you’d have to be stupid to go into a Baz Luhrmann movie expecting something understated, or even basically realistic: Elvis is a myth, and Luhrmann and Butler have conjured him. The movie is all spectacle and dazzle. It would be crazier, I think, if it weren’t. “The movie offers the audience a contract, and the audience either accepts the contract or not,” Luhrmann told Vulture of his signature style. This is a movie about show business and performance. What about Elvis suggests it should be more somber and muted? The movie’s main problem is that it is hews too closely to legacy-protection than interrogation. But just when it starts to lose you, it returns to its renewable resource: how good Butler is at summoning Elvis, not just impersonating him. 

Part of that performance is in the voice: it’s a low, gravely Southern drawl. This voice has lived on a diet of late night encores and cigarettes. The voice is tar, molasses, syrup — thick and slow, but spreadable. Matthew McConaughey and Josh Lucas would’ve started a war over this voice in 2002. The voice is on the vision board for the archetypal “assuming local carpenter” in a Hallmark movie. Kings of Leon is screaming thinking about this voice, girl. Austin Butler made a deal with Ursula the sea witch and got the rights to their drawl.