In one of the strangest footnotes to the strange history of the Nixon administration, Elvis Presley showed up at the White House gate one morning in 1970 with a letter to Richard Nixon and a request to meet the man. Nixon’s aides seized upon the unscheduled visit as an opportunity to brighten the president’s staid image and convinced him to grant Elvis an audience.
The story has been fictionalized and filmed before but never with as much humor as in Elvis & Nixon. Director Liza Johnson and a team of screenwriters have preserved the story’s true contours while imaginatively filling the gaps with plausible dialogue and details. Michael Shannon stars as Elvis, playing him straight and catching the superstar’s peculiar combo of rebelliousness and conservatism, flamboyance and reticence. The biggest problem: The real Elvis photographed with Nixon in the Oval Office was still youthful and vibrant. Shannon’s Elvis looks prematurely ready for death. Capitalizing on his role as the duplicitous president of “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey costars as Nixon. Spacey plays up Nixon’s gruff awkwardness to the point of caricature, but then, with his wooden gestures and stiff body language, Nixon was born to be caricatured.
In Elvis & Nixon, the inception for the summit between the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and the president of the United States occurred in the Graceland TV room. Disgusted by newscasts of riots, protests and flag burnings, Elvis shoots out the screens with a handgun and begins to ruminate. “It’s the drugs…it’s messing up the kids’ minds,” he decides with an irony apparent to everyone. Elvis’ death seven years later was precipitated by misuse of prescription drugs.
Deciding to be part of the solution, Elvis seeks out Nixon in the hope of receiving an agent’s badge from the Bureau of Narcotics, as the Drug Enforcement Agency was then called. And then a crazy thing happened: Nixon granted Elvis his wish—really, he became a narcotics agent in fact as well as in the movies.
Elvis & Nixon is loaded with hilarious moments, including the singer’s encounter with a pair of Elvis impersonators who think he is just another imitator of the King. And yet the screenplay endows Elvis (in real life smarter than he often let on) with moments of self-reflection on the peculiarities of his stardom. The centerpiece of the comedy is the encounter between Nixon, straight-laced as always, and Elvis, resplendent in purple cape and gold belt. It begins as an uncomfortable collision of alien worlds but soon enough, the two men find they have much in common, including the sense of being self-made men and an antipathy toward The Beatles.
Whether or not the actual Oval Office conversation is accurately echoed by the movie, Elvis & Nixon highlights the real parallels between two seemingly antithetical men who made history in the last century. Both were essentially loners, distrustful of the larger world and dependent on a tight circle of sycophants. As the end credits remind us, the careers of both men ended badly.
Elvis & Nixon
Michael Shannon
Kevin Spacey
Directed by Liza Johnson
Rated R
