That year, 1964,
What Elvis thought — who Elvis was — remains one of the great American mysteries. The strained, sour comedy Elvis & Nixon offers up the simplest of answers: He was a clown. In an early scene, we see the King briefly eye Dr. Strangelove on the screen bank in Graceland's TV room. Moments later, he's shot one of the sets and headed out on his adventure. Why? Who knows? “Elvis Presley decided his country needed him,” deadpans a title card at the start, and the film then tracks, with snickering distance, his December 1971 efforts to arrange a meeting with then-president Richard Nixon — and to offer himself as some sort of undercover narc.
All that really happened, of course, and the famous photo of Tricky Dick shaking hands with a magnificently collared King might be a magnet on your refrigerator. Liza Johnson's film, nudged along by ersatz “Green Onions” funky riffing, is itself a sort of souvenir tchotchke, a product whose only clear goal is getting the two men in the room so we can giggle: at the president's awkwardness and grievance-airing, at the singer's polite bad manners, at the ways that the men connect, a little, by hating on The Beatles.
Kevin Spacey,
Business here is not taken care of. Elvis & Nixon shows us Elvis asking DEA functionaries to become a federal agent at large, specializing in narcotics stings, but it omits Elvis' abuse of prescription drugs, which certainly could have contributed to this particular mania. It shows
Occasionally, when given a little room to breathe, Shannon suggests that story. A fear haunts this Elvis' eyes; a weariness grips his soul. Shannon twice gets out-of-nowhere
The second speech, about the twin of Elvis' who died in childbirth, comes just before the singer at last meets the president — and its placement baffles. It's nice he's finally thinking about something, but why this, now? And why is he bathed from below in red light, apparently cast by that bouquet of West Wing roses? There's also a dreary subplot in which Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) — of the group of pals,