Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC finds depth in pop iconography.
Baz “Gaudy” Luhrmann, Australia’s most hyperbolic filmmaker, has committed so many cultural offenses — the vapid modernizations Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby — that his new documentary almost comes as a shock. EPiC (Elvis Presley in Concert) makes up for his 2022 wing-ding biopic Elvis.
That doesn’t mean Luhrmann has abandoned his usual flash. EPiC whirls us through much of the Presley archival footage that Luhrmann discovered. (Production notes cite 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm footage in the Warner Bros. archives, plus clips from Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour.) Based on Luhrmann’s research, a more sensible approach to Presley results. Using concert and rehearsal footage from the more than 1,100 shows Presley performed from 1969 to 1977 at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, Luhrmann doesn’t compete with Presley’s gaudiness. His respect for showbiz flash gives way to the human being behind the Elvis image.
EPiC gets closer to the personality of the pop enigma than the insipid fictional drama did. The unguarded Elvis that emerges from the documentary footage complements our outside perspective, whether of fans, haters, or first-time viewers new to the rock-and-roll phenomenon. Luhrmann’s penchant for rapid montages (those six-second editing patterns that Madison Avenue began in the 1980s for the attention-deficit-disorder masses) rushes through biographical information so that we respond with greater fascination to Elvis’s backstage interplay and on-stage performances.
Luhrmann’s show-off style intercepts what theorist André Bazin revealed, in his famous essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” about technology’s ability to preserve life against time and death. EPiC adds to the perception of Presley’s cultural stature, providing a context for his 1950s breakthrough — the astonishing public eroticism of a low-class white American who fronted the rock-and-roll revolution. Going back to Elvis’s first TV appearances, his conscription into the once-mandatory, unifying military draft, and then his ambivalent Hollywood sojourn sets up a compelling appreciation for his late-career Las Vegas stints (now known by the normalizing term “residency”).
Through the composite scenes of Elvis accommodating his fans, playing the star they expected to see, we understand that the star is fulfilling his own interest in music: playing guitar, singing gospel, listening to Mario Lanza and opera on the radio. Luhrmann presents Elvis in media res so that we see how his country-blues roots inform the eventual pop-conquering execution of varied musical styles. History reverberates when he sings his hits (“Hound Dog,” “Little Sister,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Burning Love”) and when he covers other people’s hits (“Yesterday,” “Something,” “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”) as if to make them his own.
Elvis even appropriates the lascivious “Polk Salad Annie,” by his imitator Tony Joe White, to reflect awareness of his influence on the culture that birthed him. Those long eyelashes and sensually curling lips inspired ecstasy in his Vegas fans — brazenly flung undies threaten to turn his shows into bacchanals, yet cornball Elvis, in a high-collar white jumpsuit, bejeweled cape, and a wide professional wrestler’s belt, laughs. Luhrmann realizes everyone is in on the joke.
Before his drugs-and-obesity decline and demise, Elvis’s rise to the pinnacle of showbusiness encompassed all of late-20th-century pop. His marriage to Priscilla and the birth of daughter Lisa Marie go by with sufficient brevity, and his bonhomie with bandmates, the Memphis Mafia entourage, the Taking Care of Business rhythm section, and his Sweet Inspiration backup singers (good old boys and soul sisters) prove him an all-American galvanizer.
EPiC is not a modest achievement. It boasts a significant amount of filmmaking expertise from the enhanced archival footage, all refined for tactile IMAX effect, and the vivid soundtrack that uses Elvis interviews as narration. The title itself serves up Luhrmannesque exaggeration aplenty through its the reference to Greek poetry — as if to eclipse Greil Marcus’s ambitious “Presliad” essay in his pop-music thesis Mystery Train. But Luhrmann never gets hung up on the ethnic defensiveness that Marcus struggled to justify or the narrow resentment of rivals from Ray Charles to Public Enemy that unfairly clouds the Elvis legend. Behold the remarkable scene where Elvis sings “Love Me” — it tells all we need to know.
Luhrmann cannot rival the visionary grandeur of the Michael Jackson memorial film This Is It, in which our pop consciousness graduates from recognizing the King of Rock to acknowledging the King of Pop. EPiC is an ode to America’s grassroots pop stardom that manifests Luhrmann’s new-found practicality.
