Elvis & Nixon (2016): Strange Bedfellows

On a bizarre and fabled day in December 1970, Elvis Aaron Presley, aka The King, presented himself unannounced, in full Elvis regalia, at the gate of the White House, requesting an urgent and secret meeting with Richard Milhaus Nixon, aka President of the United States. By this point in their respective careers, each of these men was living in an insular bubble, unaware of the extent to which their lives and attitudes had veered out of the mainstream and perhaps across the bounds of objective reality. Elvis, in particular, had largely become a caricature of his public image, although as Elvis & Nixon suggests, and to his credit, he may have understood this - on some level. It’s unlikely that Nixon ever did. The most requested document from the National Archives to this day is the photo of Elvis and Nixon at their meeting.

Although Nixon famously bugged his Oval Office (viz the notorious 18 ½ minute gap in the Watergate tapes), the secret recording did not commence until two months after the Elvis meeting, so there is no transcript of their conversation. Free from such constraints, Director Liza Johnson and screenwriters Cary Elwes (Westley in The Princess Bride!), Joey Sagal and Hanala Sagal, have imagined what the event might have been like, based in part on the strange letter The King wrote to Nixon, in part on staff memos from Nixon aides, and mostly out of whole cloth.

The result is an amusing, largely frothy fantasy starring the two wonderful actors Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey, as the titular characters. The audience at the Tribeca Film Festival screening, where I saw Elvis & Nixon, quite enjoyed its campy take on the characters and their encounter –the situation as well as the protagonists were certainly bizarre enough to warrant such treatment – and there were quite a few chuckles and even some hearty belly laughs in the auditorium along the way. Taken as a fantasy, the thing works.

As a reflection of reality, I felt the movie came up short; it felt false – despite some obvious painstaking efforts to capture the way people dressed, wore the hair, and whatnot. For one thing, Elvis is portrayed as though he was still, in 1970, an idol of America’s youth – someone that girls and women swoon over and young guys aspired to emulate, when in fact he was clearly passé by this point in his career – at least in terms of social relevance, hit records and all that. While still a cultural icon, he was definitely considered unhip and even uncool. Middle-aged former bobby-soxers would still swoon at his Vegas show, but not the cute young twenty year olds shown freaking out over him in Elvis & Nixon.

Elvis & Nixon may play better for those not of the baby boom generation, but for me, and likely for other members of my generation who came of age in the 1960s, seeing Shannon as Presley and especially Spacey as Nixon took a lot of getting used to. Neither looks at all like the person he is portraying – and images of the actual Elvis and Nixon are pretty solidly embedded in the old memory banks. For example, with all due respect to Mr. Shannon, Elvis was much better looking; and regrettably, Shannon’s “Elvis hair” in the movie looks like a wig (which it is, of couse). That said, Shannon does get the Elvis manner and voice down pretty well. And while Spacey managed to nail Nixon’s body language, his mimicry of Nixon’s voice is more caricature than characterization. Given his stint as President in House of Cards, he does project a sense of “owning” the Oval Office, though.

Where the film works best is in capturing and conveying the complete absurdity of Elvis’s spur of the moment request to be made a federal “Special Agent At Large” and his insistence that he be given a secret badge from the FBI evidencing this; and likewise the perplexed yet awestruck White house reaction.

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

In general release starting April 22.