“We all let something out,” explains the King in the cinema. Four years after the biopic “Elvis”, the accompanying concert film is released. You can see a person and musician that the world had forgotten.
It’s a real Elvis. He only looks like his doppelgangers when he approaches the concert hall in Las Vegas in a cream-colored one-piece suit with fringes on the sleeves, his overture from Strauss’ “Zarathustra” already playing. Then he gets on stage and sings “That’s All Right.” It all started with his interpretation of Arthur Crudup‘s classic, twenty years before the shows at the Hotel International. The late one plays the early Elvis.
The film is called “Epic” and the acronym stands for “Elvis Presley in Concert”. The concert is made up of recordings of the performances that Elvis had to complete in the early 1970s in hundreds and hundreds of pieces until he no longer looked like himself, died and became immortal. The fact that Baz Luhrmann is bringing the collage to the cinema as a concert evening seems as consistent as it is strange. “Elvis”, Luhrmann’s feature film from 2022, added some to the clichés in which the king of rock ‘n’ roll has lived on for 49 years – but it also did away with some. The Elvis that Austin Butler transformed into in “Elvis” according to all the rules of Oscar-worthy acting was once again a human figure. A musician from Memphis. Someone who, as a poor white man, did not appropriate black culture – gospel and wardrobe, blues and wit – as one would say today, but lived it. At least he tried.
Luhrmann’s biopic told Elvis Presley’s life as a Faustiade. Starring Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks, as Mephistopheles: 1973, the manager collapses while his ward is ruining his health on stage in Las Vegas and tells the greatest story pop has produced. From the gospel mass, where the Holy Spirit enters a blonde, blue-eyed boy and blesses him with a divine voice, to the dying star who has already left his resurrected body for his songs. At the end, Austin Butler, plastered behind a silicone mask, sings his own requiem and disappears behind original recordings. “Elvis” becomes Elvis.
The originals from which Baz Luhrmann filmed his film biography – from Austin Butler’s templates in order to make his Elvis seem as real as possible – became “Epic”. The documentary-turned-feature film not only shows how carefully “Elvis” was made, from the gold EP belt buckle to the fake double chin.
You can also see and hear visual and audio evidence of what the so-called King did for the culture. For the world we live in. How he endured the roar of trolls calling him a “talentless idiot!” tried to humiliate and saw the West sink in the swing of their hips. He was insulted as a molester of girls and a traitor to the white race. He remained calm and continued dancing and singing, even when the colonel urged him to submit for the sake of peace and good money. “All people let something out,” he, Elvis, replies in “Epic” to the accusation of acting too sexy, too gay and too black: “Whatever it may be.”
“I love all music.” He actually says that in “Epic”, and not just like that. The most beautiful scenes don’t come from his concerts, where his audience dances while sitting, women’s underwear flies around his ears and he kisses the women in front of the stage. These are the film recordings from the rehearsals. Elvis is the boss, the musical director. His band, choir and orchestra follow him not because he is Elvis, but because he inhabits the songs and knows how to open them wide for everyone. They play “Polk Salad Annie” from the sultry south like in a fever, like in jazz, different every night. Others make music, he is his music.
He talks about himself as a “showman”, which is what he is, as you can see. A funny man who jokes around with the musicians and his audience and never takes himself as seriously as the world does. On the other hand, in his later years in Las Vegas he becomes a singing joke, with his hair that anticipates the wigs of his doppelgangers, his alien sunglasses and his bell-bottomed gold-trimmed pantsuits. In “Elvis” the colonel who keeps him in America and in the hotel because he has long since sold his singer’s soul says: “Every showman is a snowman.” Someone who makes it snow and soaps everyone he sells the snow to.
“Elvis”, the biopic, has enriched and deepened the clichés and images in which Elvis walks the earth like an undead. At the same time, the film biography “Priscilla” about Elvis and the love of his life with Jacob Elordi, who played him as a two-meter-tall, sad giant. Because he is no longer going away, the multiple, eternal and false Elvis, Baz Luhrmann is now bringing the real one back in “Epic”. He, Luhrmann, owes it to him, Elvis, too.
“Epic” is in cinemas from February 26th
