Elvis & Nixon
Two terrific actors star in a cinematic clash of American icons, recreating the secret meeting between President Nixon and Elvis Presley in 1970, which took place in The White House. It is a moment that was captured and recorded in a famous snapshot – a photo that has become the most requested image in America’s National Archives. While Kevin Spacey gives ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon the full House Of Cards treatment, it is Michael Shannon who has the tougher task of breathing new life into the most impersonated character on the planet. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ he might have said.
Shannon, whose lithe, angular menace has made him the go-to guy for glowering in indie movies of late, is an odd choice to play The King and is thus, by far, the most interesting aspect of this playful yet frustratingly slight film. The actor tries to strip away the clichéd Elvis-ness to bring us the real man lying underneath, which might have been a good idea if the script were trying to do the same thing. What we get throughout is a performance of great intelligence and seriousness in a movie of supreme silliness.
There are sparse details about what really went on in that meeting and the film should have had fun with that fact. Instead there’s a lot of build up, with various aides in both camps trying to make things work to get these two powerful and deluded egos to meet.
Some lovely, strange details emerge, which may or may not be true. Nixon liked to have M&Ms in a bowl on the Oval Office coffee table, but they weren’t for his guests. He liked Dr Pepper, again just for himself. Forewarned of the President’s foibles, Elvis breaks protocol and goes for the candy.
This Elvis is certainly an oddball. He travels with his gun (Lucille), and can’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to take it on the plane or into The White House. He wants to be made a ‘Federal Agent at Large’ and, as a veteran of 31 movies and a self-confessed ‘master of disguise’, is there to offer his services to a country he sees as going to the dogs. He wants rid of hippies, druggies and The Beatles. He even offers to infiltrate the Black Panthers – now that’s a movie I wouldn’t mind seeing…
Nixon, meanwhile, goes along with it to win the youth vote and to get an autograph for his daughter. Essentially, this is a film about power, ego, and about men who aren’t kept in check. Elvis and Nixon aren’t that dissimilar after all. Both are paranoid about their status and their looks. Warned about Elvis’s karate moves, Nixon asks his aides: ‘Could I take him?’ And looking around The White House, Elvis notes: ‘Looks a little like my place.’
It’s a film that makes you giggle yet refuses to go deeper, like a child turning back for the safety of the shallow end. There are hints of Nixon’s encroaching mistrust, the paranoia that would lead to Watergate and his recording of everything – even a quick scene of aides meeting in an underground car park brings in shades of Deep Throat and All The President’s Men.
Yet when it comes, the titular climactic showdown lacks drama. It’s weird, certainly, and perhaps a bit grotesque. Spacey and Shannon do convey how uncomfortable these two big, flawed, lost men are in each other’s company, in each other’s aura of very different power, but the serio-comic tone is suddenly as awkward as silence.
Given that the film had the freedom to do just what it wanted with such a moment, you can’t help but feel that, rather than watching a monumental meeting of American political and cultural history, you’re seeing a great opportunity slip by. Maybe that was the point – that pop and politics divided the nation. But this film doesn’t make it and, like Elvis, you’ll leave the building wondering what the hell just happened.