Elvis & Nixon
Liza Johnson (2016)
On 21 December 1970, a secret meeting took place at the White House between President Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. Liza Johnson’s Elvis & Nixon tells the story of how the meeting came about and what the two men said to each other. (Although the conversation happened just a few weeks before Nixon began the tape-recording of all meetings in the Oval Office, one of the President’s staff, Bud Krogh, took a hand-written note of the discussion[1].) According to Elvis’s friend Jerry Schilling, the principal supporting character in the film and one of its executive producers, Liza Johnson and the screenplay writers (Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal and Cary Elwes) take some liberties with the truth for comic effect – but it’s fair enough that the movie poster carries the tag line ‘The true story you won’t quite believe’. It’s a pity that the tag line is apt too in a way that it doesn’t intend: Elvis & Nixon never quite sparks to life. The film lasts eighty-six minutes – it’s only around the hour mark that the meeting gets underway. Most of what has gone before is anticipatory; much of what follows is an anti-climax.
Elvis wrote a letter to Nixon, asking for the meeting and expressing his concern for American youth and about the drug culture, hippies, rising crime, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and so on. He wants to do his bit and the President to have him sworn in as an undercover federal agent – Elvis, in the film, is particularly keen on having the badge to prove it. Also according to the film, Nixon doesn’t want the meeting and it’s his daughter Julie who changes the President’s mind at the eleventh hour: she’d love her father to get her Elvis’s autograph. Once the two get talking, they find some common ground – The Beatles are among the bêtes noires they find they share. Nixon gets the autograph and Elvis gets the badge. The film is tactfully directed and intelligently performed but it doesn’t have the legs for even a short feature. Its factual basis does little to flesh out its comic-sketch premise. As a result, the taste and discretion at work in Elvis & Nixon seems pointless (and there are moments in the lead-up to the meeting where it verges on soporific).
Michael Shannon as Elvis is imaginative casting but he isn’t right for the role. For one thing, he cuts a very lean figure in the King’s black jump suits and their golden appurtenances – neither Shannon’s physique nor his face hints at a man running to fat or going to seed. It’s true that Elvis Presley’s weight didn’t balloon until the last few years of his life but the official White House photograph of the December 1970 meeting, which Liza Johnson puts on screen at the end of the film, shows how puffy his face was compared with Shannon’s. Presley’s worldview is presented as unhinged and Michael Shannon has considerable experience of playing psychologically disturbed characters but that doesn’t help here: he’s subtle and empathetic but the set-up doesn’t allow for this to pay dividends. There are moments when his quietness is effective – for example, when Elvis listens politely to Bud Krogh’s recital of Oval Office protocol before flouting it as soon as he gets into the room with Nixon. But the troubled quality of Shannon’s Elvis is opaque and closed off, and there’s little suggestion of a potential for serious loss of self-control.
In physical terms, Kevin Spacey’s Commander-in-Chief looks more paunchy, amorphous and stunted than the real thing – perhaps getting the idea from Nixon’s snout, he’s like some kind of nocturnal burrowing creature. Spacey’s deliberate speech rhythms make him sound as if he’s doing an impersonation but you soon get used to this and stop noticing it. With less screen time than Shannon, Spacey occasionally shows his comic flair and he gets across Nixon’s resentful inferiority complex. Here too, though, the thoughtful underplaying is counterproductive because you don’t get a sense of Richard Nixon’s paranoia. In showing how abysmally awkward the President is, Spacey makes him too dull – this Nixon is uncool all right but he’s not the man who sweated under pressure and the glare of studio lights in the presidential election TV debates with Kennedy.
Oddly – and against expectation that the film will be engaging purely as a two-hander – characters at the margins come through as somehow just as interesting as the protagonists. They include Tracy Letts, as the Narcotics Bureau official John Finlator; Bob Hartnack, as a White House security man; and an actress whose name I can’t find from the IMDB cast list, as the jolly, incredulously laughing woman who welcomes Elvis and his companions onto the premises (Elvis says the place reminds him of Graceland). In larger parts, Colin Hanks and Evan Peters are OK as Krogh and Dwight Chapin, the two Nixon aides, although they’re a more broadly comic conception – Liza Johnson clearly takes the view that men who actually served time in the light of Watergate deserve this Tweedledee-Tweedledum treatment. The double act that accompanies Elvis comes off better. Johnny Knoxville is droll as the laconic Sonny West. Jerry Schilling, no doubt because of his involvement in the production, is virtually the hero of the story: in this case, the underplaying – by Alex Pettyfer – is effective. Pettyfer looks absolutely in period too (his hairstyle and clothes call to mind the Murray Head character in Sunday Bloody Sunday). The script contains plenty of witty lines although I missed the ‘gems of historical allusion’ to which Richard Brody’s New Yorker note refer. I hope Brody isn’t thinking of, for example, the heavy-handed irony of Nixon’s assurance to his staff that he and Henry Kissinger will have Iraq and Syria sorted out in no time.
27 June 2016
[1] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/nixon-met-elvis/assets/get_transcript.php?doc=3.1