THERE ARE moments in The King—Eugene Jarecki’s ambitious movie about how the rise and decline of Elvis Presley is a metaphor for America—when the film feels like a prophetic lament. Striking widescreen photography frames an original idea: taking the Rolls Royce that Elvis owned on a nationwide road trip, picking up hitchhikers and celebrities alike to talk about what went wrong.
Parts of it are brilliant: Chuck D lamenting how Elvis appropriated black music and ended up being coronated while “Big Mama” Thornton (for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote “Hound Dog”) remained a marginal figure; John Hiatt gently weeping in the back of the Rolls, his heart heavy at how Elvis “was so trapped”; the housekeeper who found Elvis half-dead on the toilet, and the women who live in one of his early homes, briefly centering the stark contrast between a 20th-century king and 21st-century poverty.
It’s brave and imaginative to include footage of Jarecki’s interviewees criticizing him and the film itself. The Wire creator David Simon says it would have been better to use one of Elvis’ Cadillacs—a more apt metaphor for American decline than the car of a British aristocrat. More challenging is Van Jones asking why Jarecki seems to defend a man who took the music of descendants of enslaved people, accrued enormous power for himself, and didn’t speak up when the nation needed public figures to support civil rights.
However, Jarecki also includes less insightful interviews. There’s no need to have Ashton Kutcher and Alec Baldwin in the car to talk about how difficult it is to be a celebrity: I’d rather hear more from the hitchhiker, friend, fan, or housekeeper.
And when Jarecki tries to make a point about religious manipulation, he uses a montage of four images: a Scientology logo, a faith healer, Billy Graham, and Charles Manson. There’s an especially American ill-health about the way public charisma can trick people into seeing selfishness as a virtue, but it’s at worst fundamentally distorted to link Graham with Manson, just because they both had charisma and followers.
The King doesn’t imagine a way out of the mess we’re in, and it doesn’t have to. But it paints a picture that implies there is no hope possible. In that sense, although the film’s narrative is told well, it’s half the story and should be handled with care. Its image of America may be bleak enough to stimulate despair, but not whole enough to provoke change.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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