I loved this movie. Read on to learn why.
Baz Luhrmann made this as a follow-up to his 2022 biopic. You know, the one where Aussie actors played most of the parts except for Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker.
Baz went looking for previously unseen footage of Elvis from documentary film dating back to the 70s, of the live gigs Colonel Parker organised for him in Las Vegas. This was a new approach to his music after his eight years first in the army and then making movies.
Baz found 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm film in the Warner Brothers archives stored inside salt mines in Kansas. The footage was from those early 70s Vegas shows and also from the 1957 so-called “gold jacket” performance in Hawaii. But the footage came without sound, and over the next two years, Baz’s team had it restored and synced to existing audio sources. They also found a 45-minute audio recording of Presley talking about his life story.
Most of EPiC consists of those Vegas performances, but there is also more familiar footage from Elvis’s glory days as the young king of rock ‘n roll, before the movies and Vegas. There’s something raw and pure about those early rockers – Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock, Blue Suede Shoes – and to my mind they will always define what was best about Elvis. But the Vegas stuff was a revelation: despite the cabaret-style performance, the campy, kitschy costuming and the overblown big ballad numbers (never my favourites), we see Elvis as a star who hasn’t lost his touch. He’s thickened a little around the middle but at this stage he’s still lithe and wiry and still got those trademark Elvis moves. His musicianship is excellent too. There’s an extended version of Little Sister, seamlessly segueing back and forth with the Beatles’ Get Back. It’s fantastic!
We see how Elvis’s personality informed his success as a live performer. He’s warm, witty and playful with the audience. (Sample bit of patter: ‘As a wise old philosopher once said: (pause) …You ain’t nothin but a hound dog!’ Elvis chuckles, the band crashes in and the old rocker fires up.)
The bits where he talks about his life are interspersed throughout the film. They are both illuminating and poignant. Of the charge that he was being deliberately sexually provocative with all that hip-wiggling and leg-shaking which so offended the strait-laced ‘fifties musical establishment, he explains that he simply couldn’t help himself – it was his natural reaction to the music. Elvis was no dummy and no manufactured act, like The Monkees and so many others who followed him. He was a true authentic.
In another revealing sequence, he says that apart from his army service in Germany, he’s never travelled the world, and speaks wistfully of his desire to see more of it, especially Europe.*
Luhrmann has described EPiC as not just a documentary or a concert film, but rather a project ‘that befits the magnitude of Elvis as a performer but also offers deeper revelations of his humanity and inner life.’
This is so true. I just loved it.
*The reason Elvis never performed overseas was that Colonel Parker was an illegal Dutch immigrant who never obtained US citizenship. He didn’t want the hassles of leaving and re-entering the country.