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Posts tagged ‘Baz Luhrmann’

Mar 18

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Ready for his close-up

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic released in 2022, was something I felt I could do without. What turned up during the research process, however, was something else: a cache of film shot in Las Vegas and elsewhere soon after Presley’s comeback in 1969. Hitherto unseen, it consisted of unedited footage devoted not just to recording his performances but to rehearsal and backstage scenes. Here was Luhrmann’s goldmine, and he spent a couple of years turning it into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 97-minute documentary which I saw at the BFI’s IMAX cinema in London this week.

There are things about the film that I’m not so fond of, such as the flash-cut montages that race through various aspects of Elvis’s life amd career: the looks, the screen kisses, and so on. It’s a way of bringing younger audiences up to speed, I suppose, and the 60-images-in-60-seconds approach probably seems perfectly normal to them. I found it a bit trashy — but of course there was something a bit trashy about Elvis, as there is about Luhrmann’s work. Neither of them, one imagines, would be averse to a ride in a gold Cadillac.

More seriously, the film is stuffed with passages that succeed in telling us more about Elvis than we already knew. Where Luhrman’s approach works, against all odds, is in eliding several performances of a single song, from rehearsal to Vegas showroom, creating a single unit of music containing several perspectives. Sounds a bit meretricious? Works beautifully on songs like “Burnin’ Love” (where we appear to be shown the first band rehearsal of Dennis Linde’s composition), Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and the majestic “How Great Thou Art” (although it does suggest that Elvis’s gospel chops have deteriorated since he made his first gospel album, His Hand in Mine, in 1960).

But to see him working with his rhythm section and singers is to understand how much he loved music. You can’t sing Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” the way he does without real commitment to the material. Or the quite fantastic medley of “Little Sister” and “Get Back”. You hate medleys? Try this one, which brings the best out of the guitarist James Burton and the drummer Ronnie Tutt — making me all the more angry that the closing credits don’t list any of the members of the rhythm section or the backing singers, all of whom are clearly having a ball working with the King. I’d heard that medley before, but to see it performed, with such skill and enthusiasm, is something special.

A couple of moments caught me cold. One is when the director isolates Elvis murmuring “All my trials… soon be over,” from the traditional song Mickey Newbury incorporated into his “American Trilogy”. Another is a snatch of Presley singing as if to himself: “I feel my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” He repeats it, and then, as an aside, says the name “Dylan”. I felt I’d heard it before, and I had: it’s taken from a week of all- night sessions with his band in 1971, released in 2021 on a four-CD set called Back in Nashville.

It makes you wish he’d recorded it properly, and then it makes you think about all the great songs he should have recorded, in the best possible circumstances. Instead, as he admits in contemporaneous interview footage, he wasted the ’60s making terrible Hollywood movies at the insistence of his manager, Colonel Parker, who lurks around the fringes of this documentary in a way that tells you very clearly what Luhrmann thinks of him. Elvis also expresses regret and puzzlement at not having appeared in places like Europe and Japan — anywhere outside the USA, in fact — and we know who was to blame for that.

One or two other things: the shots of the various audiences are fascinating, particularly one wide-angle view from the back of the stage at the Las Vegas International showroom. And there’s a glimpse of Elvis in a car with the Memphis Mafia, giving you a hint of their special kind of camaraderie.

In all of this footage, which I guess is from 1970-71, Elvis is in good shape — a little fuller in the face, but not in the figure. He’s lithe and agile. In good spirits, too: always ready for a goofy laugh, or to change a lyric during rehearsals to include something mildly filthy. I know that such a documentary is the director’s construct, telling the story he wants you to know. But I really did come out of it feeling warmer about Elvis the human being, and even more regretful about the opportunities he missed.

May 21

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The Baz Age

gatsbyI’ve a hearty liking for jazz music, especially Irving Berlin’s. It’s most artistic. One of the first principles of dancing is abandon, and this is a quality that jazz music possesses. It’s complex. It will, I believe, occupy a great place in American art.

That’s Zelda Fitzgerald speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun, who paid the celebrated couple a visit in October 1923, 18 months before the publication of The Great Gatsby. The interview took place in their house in Great Neck, Long Island, which Scott Fitzgerald used as the principal setting for his most celebrated novel. Zelda’s opinion of jazz was pretty advanced for its time, even if she did nominate Irving Berlin rather than King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton to illustrate her enthusiasm. She was certainly right about its place in American art.

I wrote about her husband’s description of the quasi-jazz in Gatsby in a post on this blog a couple of weeks ago (“Yellow cocktail music”, May 5), and now I’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s film, in which music plays almost as prominent a role as the actors, the script and the locations.

There are things I dislike about it, principally Tobey Maguire’s dorky portrayal of the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the otiose framing device that involves plonking Carraway in a rehab clinic where he writes a novel called The Great Gatsby. Oh, and a one-dimensional Elizabeth Debicki, grievously miscast as Jordan Baker. But there’s a lot I enjoyed, too, particularly the wholly convincing and affecting performances of the two leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, and the general exuberance of the whole thing, to which the music is crucial.

It’s sourced from all over the place and woven into Craig Armstrong’s score in such a way as to create an aural tapestry whose careful balance between light and shade is important to a film that is constantly whacking you in the eye (probably just as true for the two-dimensional version as for the 3D in which I saw it).

I was interested to note that Luhrman and Armstrong use “Rhapsody in Blue” as a stand-in for Fitzgerald’s fictional “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. This was obviously an easier solution than getting someone to write a pastiche of such a piece, and it works well enough; there’s no point in quibbling that Gershwin didn’t write his classic piece until two years after the action described in the novel because Jay Z, will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Lana Del Ray and The xx weren’t around then either, but places are found for them in the soundtrack. Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” is a particularly good fit, and Armstrong’s orchestral fills allude to Ennio Morricone’s peerless Once Upon a Time in America score, evoking the New York underworld of the early 20th century.

Bryan Ferry, his musical director Colin Good and their Jazz Age orchestra (see my post on February 13) make a subtle but notable impact throughout the film, backdating modern songs such as “Love Is the Drug”, “Bang Bang” and “Crazy in Love” (with a vocal by Emeli Sande). In addition to the regular soundtrack CD, their versions are available on an album called The Great Gatsby: The Jazz Recordings, currently downloadable via iTunes here and soon to be released in hard-copy form. One of my favourite moments in the film arrives during the party sequence in which we hear snatches of “Back to Black” from Beyonce and Ferry: a perfect fit as the mood darkens in the mansion on Long Island Sound.

* The illustration is from the dust jacket of the 1934 Modern Library edition, the first time Gatsby had been republished in the US since the original Scribner’s edition of 1925, which sold a mere 20,000 copies and was accounted a failure. It contains a rueful introduction by the author, then living in Baltimore, Maryland, close to Zelda’s sanitarium, his career at its lowest ebb. I bought it 40 years ago for not very much money at the beloved and now defunct Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street in New York City: in the heart, appropriately enough, of the old Diamond District.