‘Elvis Presley in Concert’ is a rollicking 90 minutes with the King : NPR

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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“You are my favorite customer,” Baz Luhrmann tells me on a recent Zoom call from the sunny Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. The director is on a worldwide blitz to promote his new film, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert — which opens wide this week — and he says this, not to flatter me, but because I’ve just called his film a miracle.

See, I’ve never cared a lick about Elvis Presley, who would have turned 91 in January, had he not died in 1977 at the age of 42. Never had an inkling to listen to his music, never seen any of his films, never been interested in researching his life or work. For this millennial, Presley was a fossilized, mummified relic from prehistory — like a woolly mammoth stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits — and I was mostly indifferent about seeing 1970s concert footage when I sat down for an early IMAX screening of EPiC.

By the end of its rollicking, exhilarating 90 minutes, I turned to my wife and said, “I think I’m in love with Elvis Presley.”

“I’m not trying to sell Elvis,” Luhrmann clarifies. “But I do think that the most gratifying thing is when someone like you has the experience you’ve had.”

Elvis made much more of an imprint on a young Luhrmann; he watched the King’s movies while growing up in New South Wales, Australia in the 1960s, and he stepped to 1972’s “Burning Love” as a young ballroom dancer. But then, like so many others, he left Elvis behind. As a teenager, “I was more Bowie and, you know, new wave and Elton and all those kinds of musical icons,” he says. “I became a big opera buff.”

Luhrmann only returned to the King when he decided to make a movie that would take a sweeping look at America in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s — which became his 2022 dramatized feature, Elvis, starring Austin Butler. That film, told in the bedazzled, kaleidoscopic style that Luhrmann is famous for, cast Presley as a tragic figure; it was framed and narrated by Presley’s notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, portrayed by a conniving and heavily made-up Tom Hanks. The dark clouds of business exploitation, the perils of fame, and an early demise hang over the singer’s heady rise and fall.

It was a divisive movie. Some praised Butler’s transformative performance and the director’s ravishing style; others experienced it as a nauseating 2.5-hour trailer. Reviewing it for Fresh Air, Justin Chang said that “Luhrmann’s flair for spectacle tends to overwhelm his basic story sense,” and found the framing device around Col. Parker (and Hanks’ “uncharacteristically grating” acting) to be a fatal flaw.

Personally, I thought it was the greatest thing Luhrmann had ever made, a perfect match between subject and filmmaker. It reminded me of Oliver Stone’s breathless, Shakespearean tragedy about Richard Nixon (1995’s Nixon), itself an underrated masterpiece. Yet somehow, even for me, it failed to light a fire of interest in Presley himself — and by design, I now realize after seeing EPiC, it omitted at least one major aspect of Elvis’ appeal: the man was charmingly, endearingly funny.

As seen in Luhrmann’s new documentary, on stage, in the midst of a serious song, Elvis will pull a face, or ad lib a line about his suit being too tight to get on his knees, or sing for a while with a bra (which has been flung from the audience) draped over his head. He’s constantly laughing and ribbing and keeping his musicians, and himself, entertained. If Elvis was a tragedy, EPiC is a romantic comedy — and Presley’s seduction of us, the audience, is utterly irresistible.

Unearthing old concert footage 

It was in the process of making Elvis that Luhrmann discovered dozens of long-rumored concert footage tapes in a Kansas salt mine, where Warner Bros. stores some of their film archives. Working with Peter Jackson’s team at the post-production facility Park Road Post, who did the miraculous restoration of Beatles rehearsal footage for Jackson’s 2021 Disney+ series, Get Back, they burnished 50-plus hours of 55-year-old celluloid into an eye-popping sheen with enough visual fidelity to fill an IMAX screen. In doing so, they resurrected a woolly mammoth. The film — which is a creative amalgamation of takes from rehearsals and concerts that span from 1970 to 1972 — places the viewer so close to the action that we can viscerally feel the thumping of the bass and almost sense that we’ll get flecked with the sweat dripping off Presley’s face.

This footage was originally shot for the 1970 concert film Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, and its 1972 sequel, Elvis on Tour, which explains why these concerts were shot like a Hollywood feature: wide shots on anamorphic 35mm and with giant, ultra-bright Klieg lights — which, Luhrmann explains, “are really disturbing. So [Elvis] was very apologetic to the audience, because the audience felt a bit more self conscious than they would have been at a normal show. They were actually making a movie, they weren’t just shooting a concert.”

Luhrmann chose to leave in many shots where camera operators can be seen running around with their 16mm cameras for close-ups, “like they’re in the Vietnam War trying to get the best angles,” because we live in an era where we’re used to seeing cameras everywhere and Luhrmann felt none of the original directors’ concern about breaking the illusion. Those extreme close-ups, which were achieved by operators doing math and manually pulling focus, allow us to see even the pores on Presley’s skin — now projected onto a screen the size of two buildings.

The sweat that comes out of those pores is practically a character in the film. Luhrmann marvels at how much Presley gave in every single rehearsal and every single concert performance. Beyond the fact that “he must have superhuman strength,” Luhrmann says, “He becomes the music. He doesn’t mark stuff. He just becomes the music, and then no one knows what he’s going to do. The band do not know what he’s going to do, so they have to keep their eyes on him all the time. They don’t know how many rounds he’s going to do in ‘Suspicious Minds.’ You know, he conducts them with his entire being — and that’s what makes him unique.”

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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It’s not the only thing. The revivified concerts in EPiC are a potent argument that Elvis wasn’t just a superior live performer to the Beatles (who supplanted him as the kings of pop culture in the 1960s), but possibly the greatest live performer of all time. His sensual, magmatic charisma on stage, the way he conducts the large band and choir, the control he has over that godlike gospel voice, and the sorcerer’s power he has to hold an entire audience in the palm of his hands (and often to kiss many of its women on the lips) all come across with stunning, electrifying urgency.

Shaking off the rust and building a “dreamscape” 

The fact that, on top of it all, he is effortlessly funny and goofy is, in Luhrmann’s mind, essential to the magic of Elvis. While researching for Elvis, he came to appreciate how insecure Presley was as a kid — growing up as the only white boy in a poor Black neighborhood, and seeing his father thrown into jail for passing a bad check. “Inside, he felt very less-than,” says Luhrmann, “but he grows up into a physical Greek god. I mean, we’ve forgotten how beautiful he was. You see it in the movie; he is a beautiful looking human being. And then he moves. And he doesn’t learn dance steps — he just manifests that movement. And then he’s got the voice of Orpheus, and he can take a song like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and make it into a gospel power ballad.

“So he’s like a spiritual being. And I think he’s imposing. So the goofiness, the humor is about disarming people, making them get past the image — like he says — and see the man. That’s my own theory.”

Elvis has often been second-classed in the annals of American music because he didn’t write his own songs, but Luhrmann insists that interpretation is its own invaluable art form. “Orpheus interpreted the music as well,” the director says.

In this way — as in their shared maximalist, cape-and-rhinestones style — Luhrmann and Elvis are a match made in Graceland. Whether he’s remixing Shakespeare as a ’90s punk music video in Romeo + Juliet or adding hip-hop beats to The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann is an artist who loves to take what was vibrantly, shockingly new in another century and make it so again.

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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Luhrmann says he likes to take classic work and “shake off the rust and go, Well, when it was written, it wasn’t classical. When it was created, it was pop, it was modern, it was in the moment. That’s what I try and do.”

To that end, he conceived EPiC as “an imagined concert,” liberally building sequences from various nights, sometimes inserting rehearsal takes into a stage performance (ecstatically so in the song “Polk Salad Annie”), and adding new musical layers to some of the songs. Working with his music producer, Jamieson Shaw, he backed the King’s vocals on “Oh Happy Day” with a new recording of a Black gospel choir in Nashville. “So that’s an imaginative leap,” says Luhrmann. “It’s kind of a dreamscape.”

On some tracks, like “Burning Love,” new string arrangements give the live performances extra verve and cinematic depth. Luhrmann and his music team also radically remixed multiple Elvis songs into a new number, “A Change of Reality,” which has the King repeatedly asking “Do you miss me?” over a buzzing bass line and a syncopated beat.

I didn’t miss Elvis before I saw EPiC — but after seeing the film twice now, I truly do.