Kritiken

For all the abiding sense that Jarecki has just kept shooting and shooting, there’s an underlying purpose here, implying that the meaning of Elvis is the meaning of America itself.

Jarecki often tries to gives us Rockers in a Rolls Getting Coffee, but I never felt the love or even the like for Elvis emanating from Jarecki or bonding him with his car-mates. It’s a counterintuitive film in the worst sense. The conversations lack spark and spontaneity.

[The movie includes] encyclopedia-style snippets of history, authentically pained but insubstantial musings on “how we got here,” and an odd reliance on the comments of celebrities who lack any particular Presley connection, and who end up stifling the genuine insights of non-celebrity subjects who do. As a result, “The King” isn’t so much a diagnosis as it is a part of the mediascape that it decries.

An overstuffed, meditative and—at times—very strange documentary about Elvis, America in decline, the rise of Trump, 20th and 21st century culture, imperialism (military, economic, and cultural), and the nature of fame (to name a few). "The King" is so vast it often strains to make connections, but its form—an intricate intersecting montage, a flashcard bombardment of images and clips—keeps the film chugging along.

Elvis is a king with flaws: As an entertainer who became larger than life, he could have done more for a racially divided country. Yet the essence of Elvis is inclusive, an entreaty to America to strive to be its best possible self. That’s the truth Jarecki seeks to express in The King; damned if he doesn’t pull it off.

It’s a chaotic end, but the journey is the destination in a movie that gives you plenty to think about and argue with, as it racks up the miles and people clamber in and out of both the Rolls and the movie.

Obsessively, virtuosically collapsing his interviews with shots of gorgeously ravaged landscapes set to visceral blasts of rock-n'-roll, soul, rap, and blues, Jarecki renders pop culture as a kind of manufactured oxygen that seems to be on the precipice of gaining physical materiality.

Jarecki goes for broke with a brutal final montage set to Elvis’s rendition of “Unchained Melody” at the end of his 1977 concert—the one where he was blotto on drugs but nevertheless pulled off one last soaring cry from the heart. He was dead two months later. The King suggests that while we are already following Elvis’s road to self-destruction, it is still possible to turn left and pull away.

Though it sometimes bites off more than it can chew, this often beautiful documentary is never short of riveting.

Jarecki has built a well-deserved reputation for impeccably crafted, scrupulously researched and, above all, concisely argued and structured left-leaning documentaries, among them The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Why We Fight and The House I Live In. Sadly, although his latest, Promised Land, may be his most broadly appealing film so far, it's arguably his messiest and least intellectually satisfying work.