The Wonder of Elvis, as Exhilaratingly Depicted by Baz Luhrmann

It used to be dogma among rock and roll fans that the pinnacle of Elvis Presley’s career was his early years, the period that began with his emergence on Sun Records and then continued with his initial rise to superstardom but then ended with his hitch in the army in 1958. This is, not coincidentally, the period covered in depth in the first volume of Peter Guralnick’s definitive two-part biography, “Last Train To Memphis.” That happens to be an unfortunately common opinion regarding the early period of a great musician’s work. I’ve seen the same misguided logic applied to the canons of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Nat King Cole, among others. Alas, many are the fans, and worse, the biographers, who take the easy way out by insisting that these iconic figures all made their greatest impact as relatively young men, and everything that came after that is negligible. The only significant figure to largely escape that misconception is Sinatra, which is instructive: to me, saying that Elvis (1935-1977) was only great in his pre-military early twenties is like saying Sinatra hit his own peak during his years with Tommy Dorsey, or in his WW2 era recordings for Columbia. Granted, those are quintessential chapters in both careers — but they are hardly the summit.If Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert”, which is now streaming, makes any single point, it’s that Elvis’s greatest years began with his return to live performance in 1969 — on the heels of his so-called “Comeback” TV special (1968) and the pivotal album, “From Elvis in Memphis.” For the rest of his life, which ended tragically at the young age of 42, Presley was primarily a concert artist. Nearly all of his subsequent work, including two more theatrical films and two more TV specials, was driven by his personal appearances.Even though “EPiC” has recently been made available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home, this is a production best viewed on a large screen. So far, I’ve watched it twice, once on a huge IMAX screen and again on my home theater — it looks and sounds amazing in both venues, but experiencing it in the company of others is in itself remarkable, and brings you closer to actually being in the room with the King himself.Presley broke barriers. He’s generally regarded as the first great rock ‘n’ roll star, but his music contains multitudes: country, blues, traditional pop, and eventually gospel and soul music. Likewise, “EPiC” refuses to stay in one lane: it’s part documentary, part concert film, a genre that Presley pioneered but which has been largely irrelevant since the rise of MTV. Mr. Luhrmann’s film more or less uses the 1970 “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is” — concentrating on Presley’s August 1970 shows at the International Hotel in Las Vegas — as its starting point.From there, the narrative goes backwards and forwards. Making use of a newly unearthed audio interview, Mr. Luhrmann quickly summarizes the Elvis story from his childhood through the doldrums of the mid-1960s, when his career was reduced to churning out one crummy movie after another. We are shown a quick succession of clips from 1963’s “Fun in Acapulco” and 1968’s “Live a Little, Love a Little” which aren’t even the worst of his cinematic efforts of the era.Elvis’s return to the stage in 1969 is presented as the triumph that it was, and there are both familiar numbers and new footage from “That’s the Way it Is” and its 1973 follow-up, “Elvis on Tour.” Mr. Luhrmann’s general approach is to present each of the major songs in Presley’s concert line-up through a variety of performances including rehearsals; he cuts, on the beat thankfully, from one to the other, and they all line up perfectly in the same key and tempo. The effect is exhilarating and at times schizophrenic. Mr. Luhrmann has surely contributed to our declining attention span in that the cuts seem to come faster and faster —Elvis’s father Vernon Presley says at one point, of his son’s rise to fame, “It happened so fast it’s hard to keep up with it.” That also applies to Mr. Luhrmann’s editing style. But still, most of the numbers are full length, such as a glorious extended composite of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” compiled from half a dozen sources. In this context, the songs assume a whole new power. The audio and video are superb and I can only imagine that the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD editions, scheduled for release in June, will look and sound even better. The visual nature lies in seeing the nuances you don’t get from the audio alone, as when he shakes himself furiously between the lines of the blues “Tiger Man” and when he dances and conducts simultaneously in a manner that recalls Cab Calloway. I would welcome an extended director’s cut, as well as an annotated edition with subtitles delineating precisely where every clip is from.Baz Luhrmann and Rod Stewart at the London premiere of ‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.’ Kate Green/Getty ImagesLord, but the man had style! The very first shot of the film is Presley strolling out on stage wearing something that’s equal parts a classic Nashville Nudie suit and caped costumery from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Meanwhile, we hear the fanfare of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra,” as recently popularized in the 1968 science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.’” You might think this is a highly ostentatious way to present oneself, but Presley is the opposite of pretentious. He is constantly poking fun at the songs, the settings, and most of all himself. There’s his famous aside during “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (“I’d get down on my knees for you, if this suit wasn’t so tight”) as well as a moment in “Are You Lonesome Tonight” where he inserts a gag lyric (“Do you gaze at your bald head, and wish you had hair?” Ouch!). Elsewhere, he introduces himself as Fats Domino.That’s perhaps the major point of the entire enterprise: as Elvis says early in the proceedings, “If I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, they wouldn’t come out to see me the next time.” “EPiC” gives us only the most upbeat and positive portrayal of one of America’s key cultural figures, there’s no hint of the impending darkness that would overtake him and extinguish his burning light just a few years later. As Bono puts it, in an infamous poem quoted at the end, “Elvis ate America before America ate him.”

The Wonder of Elvis, as Exhilaratingly Depicted by Baz Luhrmann

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