Elvis Meets Nixon Reviews

Politics and music purists might find ELVIS MEETS NIXON to be sugar-coated and implausible, but director Allan Arkush's 1997 made-for-cable film works best when viewed strictly as a light comedy. It's December 1970 and Elvis Presley (Rick Peters) is bored. His hangers-on, the "Memphis Mafia," want some time off from sucking-up duty for the holidays; his father Vernon (Dennis Doherty) and wife Priscilla (Alyson Court) want to curtail his spending habits by putting him on an allowance. Defiant, Elvis leaves Graceland, going out in public without an escort for the first time since the age of 21. The law-and-order junkie intends to fly to Washington DC, meet with government officials and add the badge of Federal agent to the collection of honorary sheriff's titles he's accumulated. The King's journey is circuitous, however, taking him on a picaresque tour through the nation's capital, where he essentially holds up a donut shop at gunpoint, then to San Francisco, where he interacts with hippies and war protestors and realizes that his records are now ensconced in the "oldies" bins. Ultimately, Elvis makes his way back to DC, gets his Fed title and a bizarre photo opportunity with President Richard Nixon (Bob Gunton). As culturally out of touch as Elvis, Nixon believes that the meeting will "let the kids know that it's groovy to like me!" While the events of the film are based on reality (the Presley-Nixon meeting and photo really happened--the filmmakers claimed in interviews that the donut-shop incident did also!), Arkush openly exaggerates. The director has fun with ongoing jokes like Elvis's claim to be traveling "incognito" (he uses phony names, but wears a sparkling purple jumpsuit with a cape throughout his trip). Arkush also uses cutaways to documentary-style talking-head interviews with celebrities like Dick Cavett and Tony Curtis, who comment on the action and move the story along, Greek chorus-style. Cavett is particularly humorous in a timeline epilogue that tracks the astonishing simultaneous peaks and valleys of Presley's and Nixon's careers. Peters is a standout. While the actor looks and sounds enough like the genuine article, he deftly inhabits his role with just the right mixture of bravado and naivete to sell the film's take on the star. Gunton goes for a literal interpretation of Nixon's whacked-out speech impediments and physical tics, which at times sends the Nixon scenes a little over the top tonally, but this is The King's story and Arkush never strays far from his side. Not intended as a psychedelic period piece nor as a reverent biopic, ELVIS MEETS NIXON is an amusing, and quite odd, addition to the canon of movies made about the Elvis phenomenon. (Profanity, substance abuse.)