Elvis' late-career jumpsuits weren't just stage flash; they were a quiet record of his decline, argues Amy Argetsinger in the Washington Post. In Baz Luhrmann's new IMAX concert film, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, assembled from largely unseen 1970s footage, you can watch the costumes shift from sleek, karate-influenced white suits to heavier, more ornate getups that strain to flatter a man dulled by pills, boredom, and the grind of more than 1,000 Vegas shows, she writes. Luhrmann splices together performances from multiple concerts—sometimes within a single song—so that jumpsuit changes become visual time jumps, contrasting a clear-eyed 1970 Elvis with the "puffy, dull-eyed" version of a few years later.
"The King's unraveling played out in the spotlight, one costume change at a time," writes Argetsinger, who calls it "one of the subtler revelations of a film that delivers more of them than you would expect for a concert film." Argetsinger writes that the film largely lets Elvis "narrate" via old interviews while hinting at what it leaves unsaid: the role of manager Tom Parker in keeping him locked into the Vegas-and-US-tour loop ("like a bird hitting a glass window," says Luhrmann) and away from the overseas gigs he craved until his 1977 death. Luhrmann calls the movie a kind of fantasy world tour, the one Elvis "dreamed of but never had." Read Argetsinger's full piece here.
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