Elvis & Nixon | Little White Lies

Elvis & Nixon

22 Jun 2016 / Released: 24 Jun 2016

Words by Elena Lazic

Directed by Liza Johnson

Starring Alex Pettyfer, Kevin Spacey, and Michael Shannon

Portrait of a man wearing a black coat, standing in a room with two other people seated in the background.
Portrait of a man wearing a black coat, standing in a room with two other people seated in the background.
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Anticipation.

Wise men say only fools rush in.

2

Enjoyment.

A little less conversation, a little more action.

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In Retrospect.

We can’t go on together...

A lack of con­tex­tu­al depth and con­trast­ing act­ing styles under­mines this off­beat apo­lit­i­cal comedy.

As reac­tionary pol­i­tics and rhetoric are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar in the US and the UK, it might not be the health­i­est cli­mate in which to release a wacky com­e­dy about one of America’s most harm­ful right wing politi­cians. Yet one might have hoped that Elvis & Nixon – inspired by the meet­ing of the King with POTUS in 1970 – would embrace the edgi­ness of its mate­r­i­al and grap­ple with the moral ambi­gu­i­ties of this sur­re­al event, one which occurred in the mid­dle of a peri­od of incred­i­ble unrest in the US.

As it is, the film strange­ly ignores Nixon’s his­to­ry through­out, even in an on-screen where-are-they-now’ text clos­ing the film which bizarrely focus­es on the sen­tences doled out to the President’s assis­tants. Elvis mean­while, a fig­ure of immense influ­ence on the emer­gence of the coun­ter­cul­ture (albeit reluc­tant­ly), is here to be enjoyed as so much com­ic scenery, a riff on an iconog­ra­phy no deep­er real­ly than that pre­sent­ed in Jack White’s Walk Hard cameo.

In this odd­ly dat­ed, polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral film, Kevin Spacey deliv­ers a fit­ting­ly unimag­i­na­tive but nonethe­less effi­cient per­for­mance, pre­sent­ing his Nixon as an endear­ing­ly angry, old-fash­ioned and patri­ot­ic fam­i­ly man. Spacey plays his scenes as clas­sic Hol­ly­wood farce. How­ev­er, the film itself oscil­lates inde­ci­sive­ly between a com­e­dy of total absur­di­ty in the vein of the Coens (think Burn After Read­ing) and some­thing far more mut­ed and som­bre, offer­ing only polite giggles.

The first half hour for instance sees at least a dozen char­ac­ters exclaim Elvis Pres­ley!” on see­ing the King, a sce­nario which is pre­sent­ed as innate­ly hilar­i­ous on each occa­sion. This becomes quick­ly repet­i­tive and dull, reach­ing the point of active irri­ta­tion around the fourth time a beau­ti­ful woman goes into fan­girl mode for the King. But more insid­i­ous than the apo­lit­i­cal caper vibe is the film’s vague embrace of a kind of depress­ing nos­tal­gia. We are pre­sent­ed with a time that seems sim­pler’, where nei­ther Viet­nam nor the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s seem to have occurred in any tan­gi­ble way. The clos­est we come to an acknowl­edge­ment of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion is in Elvis’ bewil­dered, strung out com­plaints about drug cul­ture, and even this is not queried, but rather played for laughs being mere­ly a facet of lat­ter day Elvis’ cute zaniness.

After a string of incred­i­ble stand out per­for­mances in Amer­i­can indies and main­stream movies alike, it comes as some­thing of a sur­prise that one of the biggest dis­ap­point­ments here is Michael Shan­non. The actor of course bears no resem­blance to the singer what­so­ev­er, being too tall, too skin­ny and his face exhibit­ing a kind of rough­ness that sits in total con­trast to the pop star’s baby face. Shan­non does not attempt to ape Elvis man­ner­isms in par­tic­u­lar, some­thing which sits in uncom­fort­able con­trast to Spacey’s straight­for­ward attempt at imper­son­ation. Instead, the actor seems bored and bare­ly present, mum­bling through a per­for­mance even he does not seem to be par­tic­u­lar­ly con­vinced by.

Such a con­trast of act­ing modes, along with a rather bland and timid film­mak­ing style and an exces­sive pro­long­ing of the film’s big moment – the meet­ing – makes for a cringe­wor­thy and quite under­whelm­ing cli­mac­tic encounter between the two record­ing artists’, as the excel­lent tagline goes, hint­ing at Water­gate with a sly wit that is entire­ly absent from the actu­al movie. To the film’s cred­it, the meet­ing scene is indeed its high­est point, even if it presents itself as slight­ly pre­dictable and not as ludi­crous as it could – or should – have been. A moment when Elvis per­forms a karate move for a baf­fled Nixon sounds fun­nier than it is on screen, for instance.

How­ev­er, any momen­tum the film gains in its last act is repeat­ed­ly under­mined by an uncom­fort­able, extend­ed joke about Elvis want­i­ng to enter the White House with a cool gun for the pres­i­dent, and by a redun­dant sub­plot about The King’s friend Jer­ry (Alex Pet­tyfer, actu­al­ly asleep) who wants to go back home to his girl­friend (Sky Fer­reira, dit­to) in time to meet her par­ents and pro­pose. We don’t need this attempt at an emo­tion­al core, nei­ther do we need it to down­play the nut­ti­ness of the main event. Indeed, a bold­er film might have played up the absur­di­ty and sur­re­al­ism of the sit­u­a­tion or giv­en some grip­ping his­tor­i­cal con­text for all this. As it is, there isn’t much to get all shook up about.

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