There are films adapted from songs. There are, alas, films adapted from video games. Elvis & Nixon, a more exotic beast, is one of the few films adapted from a photograph.
In 1970, Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon to ask if he might be of help in (as it wasn’t yet called) the War on Drugs. The resulting image – reportedly the most requested ever from the US National Archives – has already inspired a modestly budgeted 1997 film named Elvis Meets Nixon. That photo really is the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima of middle-aged hubristic delusion.
Liza Johnson’s film will find itself pushing at a great many already-open doors. Elvis remains a sacred monster. Nixon’s discomfort with the media only adds to his appeal for film-makers (it’s so much more interesting to poke your camera after camera-shy wildlife). The glossy decay of the early 1970s still excites the senses.
Clocking in at under 90 minutes, Elvis & Nixon will interest those already interested, but it may struggle to engage those not yet engaged. The efforts to kill time until we get the two great men together feel a little desperate. Nobody will care much about the subplot that sees Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), Elvis’s right-hand man, pondering a proposal to his girlfriend. The negotiations that precede the meeting play like an attempt to dramatise a mortgage consultation. The stammering awe that greets Elvis wherever he goes is played for laughs, but the humour is deflated by an unexpectedly frustrating performance from Michael Shannon as the King.
Shannon deserves his reputation as our era’s Warren Oates. But he simply isn’t Elvis. More specifically he isn’t the Elvis of 1970. Shannon comes across like a dust-bowl refugee untimely rammed into another man’s clothes and another man’s habits. A few decades ago, Shannon might have made a brilliant shy young Elvis, but he is the very antithesis of the older megalomaniac showman.
In contrast, Kevin Spacey is quite brilliant as Nixon: coiled, repressed, vulnerable. The hunched posture and the curled hand gestures are carried off perfectly. His slow realisation that the two men – on the surface so different – are both being left behind by different fashions is touchingly convincing. One ends up wishing for more Nixon and less Elvis, which is not something many people said at the time.
