What happens when the King and the president meet? Everything and nothing.
That’s exactly what happens in the 86 minutes of “Elvis and Nixon,” a fictionalized account of the meeting between Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon) and Richard Nixon (Kevin Spacey) at the White House in 1970.
Nixon didn’t begin his infamous secret recordings until 1971, so the only record of the meeting is a now-famous photo of the two men shaking hands in the Oval Office. Taking it from there, writers Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal and Cary Elwes (yes, the “Princess Bride” and “Saw” actor, in his screenwriting debut) create something that wavers between historical fan fiction and a serious character study of two larger-than-life figures.
The path to this unlikely meeting starts when Elvis, no longer the young pop idol of “Jailhouse Rock” and on the cusp of becoming the bedazzled caricature that launched a million impersonators, feels the urge to do something for his country after seeing drugged-up, draft card-burning hippies on TV. For unclear reasons, he hops on a plane to LA, gets arrested for carrying guns, is bailed out by his friend Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) and then hops on another plane with Jerry to Washington D.C.
En route, he pens a letter to Nixon, offering up his services to his country and requesting to be named a “federal agent at-large” so he can go undercover in the war on drugs (yes, really). P.S. He really wants a badge to go with the title. Through the machinations of Jerry, Nixon aide/Elvis fan Egil “Bud” Krogh (Colin Hanks) and Nixon’s assistant Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters), Nixon reluctantly agrees to the meeting.
The climactic meeting is well-acted, well-written utter nonsense, an awkward yet moderately entertaining pissing content between two men who have no business being in the same room together. Their conversation, supposed to take five minutes, evolves into a bit of a saga as they meander among a series of topics that touch upon everything. And nothing.
Superficially, it’s a stretch to see Spacey and even more so Shannon as the figures they’re portraying. (In one of the first scenes, Spacey just looks like an older Frank Underwood hunched behind his desk in the Oval Office.) But the acting chops of both help overcome the wide visual gap.
Shannon in particular slips easily among the different shades of Elvis’ character: the arrogant pop icon who can charm his way through anything, the delusional washed-up superstar possibly going off the deep end and the lonely man trapped behind the facade of his fame. Even if the whole time you can’t help but think he just looks like a half-baked impersonator on his way to an Elvis convention.
Likewise distracting is the writing, which flip-flops between slick and sly dialogue (“Thank you, thank you very much,” Elvis unironically says at one point) and stilted monologues that make everyone sound like self-analyzing pseudo-psychologists. Yes, people often think about their feelings and why they do things; less likely is sharing these thoughts with others, especially strangers.
If you like history and have a tolerance for the wacky, this movie is right up your alley. If you like movies that have some sort of a point, then perhaps it’s better to wait until “Elvis and Nixon” has left the building.
2 stars.
Rated R.
