Spoiler alert: Elvis meets Nixon. There’s really not much more to the odd-bird historical comedy Elvis & Nixon, which recently premiered at Tribeca, than that. Elvis gets the idea to meet Nixon. Elvis goes to D.C. to meet Nixon. Complications temporarily stand between Elvis meeting Nixon, until Elvis meets Nixon, after which the movie ends.
It might just be the lowest-stakes movie this side of a Richard Linklater picture, primarily because director Liza Johnson takes less interest in the two icons for who they are than what they represent. In 1970, Elvis Presley showed up unannounced at the northwest gate of the White House coolly requesting an audience with Richard Nixon so that the President could swear him in as a Federal Agent-at-Large (a position Presley assumed existed, and was not actually a thing). At this point, Elvis and the Commander-in-Chief were probably the two most famous living Americans. They both wanted something from one another, and Elvis & Nixon has fun investigating what happens when two people unaccustomed to the word “no” collide. Nixon and Elvis could be anyone, for all this film cares; it finds far more fascination in celebrity on a conceptual level, and their unlikely-but-true meeting cannily illustrates the fragility of fame.
Oh, and Michael Shannon does karate.
Landing Shannon to portray the King and Spacey for our weaseliest President was a major coup, but that’s not even the half of it: Evan Peters and Colin Hanks step in as the federal flunkies responsible for coordinating the powwow and Alex Pettyfer plays an old Elvis pal, and they’re joined by professional testicle-punisher Johnny Knoxville, Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts, cure for the common pop star Sky Ferreira, Spring Breakers grad Ashley Benson, and model-socialite Poppy Delevingne. This ends up being a double-edged sword for the film, as it corrals all these left-field performers and then squanders them on two-line bit parts. But even so, the pure weirdness factor proves amusing.
The same could be said of the two main performers as well. Spacey and Shannon imbue both of their frequently impersonated characters with enough humanity to avoid full-on caricature while still leaning into the foundational strangeness of the project, and clearly relishing the chance to do so. (Even though he remains almost perfectly stoic throughout the film, it’s obvious Shannon’s having the time of his life.) At the same time, the film resists the urge endemic to biopics to use these real-life events to explain the minutiae and internal contradictions of a famous figure, the same trouble that hamstrung Trumbo last fall. By the end credits, it’s not any more clear why Elvis felt it was his personal duty to combat the drug menace in the United States by becoming a make-believe secret agent. What is clear, however, is that regardless of the subject at hand, any celebrity necessarily cultivates an ambivalent relationship with his or her own fame.
Both Nixon and Elvis, due partially to the huge demands on their schedule and their value to the culture at large, require a fleet of handlers. They don’t realize it, but they both lead sheltered lives, with teams of men ensuring that they receive the proper eye contact and snack foods to ensure their comfort and satisfaction. Fame traps both men with delusion and isolation — in one of the film’s more graceless moments, Elvis confesses that he feels like nobody really “sees” him — and the fundamental opposition of their needs during this meeting of the minds jostles them out of their cocoons of privilege. As the men size one another up and gently push each other out of their respective comfort zones, they gradually progress towards something more precious than a good photo op: a moment of genuine human interaction.
Filling a feature-length run time with what boils down to a pretty slight anecdote requires some finesse and padding, most of which comes via a subplot involving Elvis’ right-hand man Jerry “Mr. Cougar” Schilling (Pettyfer) planning to propose to his girlfriend (Ferreira). Schilling’s a pretty undercooked character, and his scenes don’t add much shading to the character of Elvis, either. And the script (written in part by Cary Elwes) could have stood one more rewrite to weed out the occasional glaringly obvious line of dialogue, such as Jerry explicitly laying out why he doesn’t want to play second banana to Elvis his whole life. But instead of painting a detailed portrait of either man, the broad strokes of Elvis & Nixon paint a landscape covering fame’s rocky terrain. Celebrities: they’re not just like us!
