The Palm Beach Post

‘Elvis Presley: The Searcher’ is a beautiful way to rediscover the King

- By Hank Stuever Washington Post

Here is Elvis, rehabbed at last and brought down from his lofty and lunatic afterlife as an icon, reminding us that he was once just a man.

Of course, he was never just any man, he was ELVIS - from birth, it seems. The surviving twin of a doting mother, raised up from the Depression dirt of Tupelo and postwar slums of Memphis, opening his mouth in front of Sam Phillips’ microphone and seamlessly merging black and white American song traditions into a form that was new and everlastin­g. He was imbued with the holy spirit of gospel music and landed instead on something faddishly called rock ‘n’ roll.

With a raft of producers that includes Priscilla Presley, director Thom Zimny’s insightful and stirring 3 1/2hour HBO documentar­y, “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” (premiering today) is a fine demonstrat­ion of how the passage of time can help place even the biggest and most overloved superstars into a blessed relief. The film is a calm and deeply empathetic recounting of Presley’s life, split in two. The first half takes us up to 1960 and his career-interrupti­ng military service; the second half is, well, the rest of Elvis: movie star, obsessive workhorse, sweat-drenched showman, tragic figure.

A careful melange of archival film and sonic clarity, “The Searcher” is a fine reassessme­nt of Presley’s origins and impact. Its many sources, whether alive or dead (from Elvis himself to “Colonel” Tom Parker to writers such as Alan Light and Jon Landau and musicians such as Robbie Robertson and Emmylou Harris) are heard in interviews rather than seen by a camera, which helps maintain a serious focus.

Sound is far more important than celebrity here, and it’s plain that the people who helped produce “The Searcher” are fixed on the subject of artistry - the inspiratio­ns, the songs, the voice and the creative decisions that shaped the career. Serious scholarshi­p also comes into play, even though the film is content to let the viewer decide how much of Elvis’ music is about absorption, as opposed to appropriat­ion. His debts to African-American music are accounted for, as are his contributi­ons: “(Presley) pointed to black culture and said this is something that’s filled with the force of life,” says Bruce Springstee­n. “If you want to be complete and fulfilled as a person, if you want to be an American, this is something that you need to pay attention to.”

“The Searcher” is a marvelous entry point for viewers who have only known Presley to be dead - as a statue or a postage stamp or a skydiving troupe of impersonat­ors. It’s also a must-see for people whose exposure to his musical catalogue is limited to one or two hits, as well as those who still mentally cleave Presley’s story into thin and fat. (Although those periods still work for Zimny as a basic through-line.) It’s a film for anyone who has lost track of what circumstan­ces made Presley a legend, as well as those circumstan­ces that finished him off. Through the film’s epic span and fleetingly impressive moments of timetravel, it is almost possible to fall in love with him the way everybody else once did.

During a clip of Presley’s first TV performanc­e on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show,” Zimny slows the film speed and the song is replaced by a divine interlude. Suddenly we are hearing the words of the late Tom Petty, here from heaven to explain so perfectly what we are watching:

“His body picks up all the intricacie­s of the rhythm. It’s so lightheart­ed, but it’s so deep and meaningful at the same time,” Petty says. “It’s such a magical thing to see, because of the kinescopes just the way it distorts the image. There’s some beautiful thing going down there. And it must have been really incredible to see it with no warning.”

To see it with no warning. It’s on this point that “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” soars, making it possible to view someone as recognizab­le as Presley fully anew, the way he must of appeared in American living rooms, where he caused such a fuss.

The only place “The Searcher” feels noticeably incomplete is when the end arrives, perhaps out of deference to Priscilla’s involvemen­t (the couple divorced in 1973) or perhaps as a trade-off for access to a trove of archival material. Elvis’ death at age 42 in 1977 is seen more as a release from misery than a preventabl­e excess, and there’s not one peep about his amazing and profitable afterlife as a dead icon.

The documentar­y also seems determined to settle old scores with Colonel Parker, who died in 1997 and whose management of Presley’s career is portrayed here as cruelly constricti­ve and creatively tragic, choosing for his client a path strewn with cornball movies and, in the final years, Las Vegas servitude. A suggestive theory sort of hangs there: Even the King was beholden to the man, but still he rises.

 ?? PHOTO COURTESY OF HBO ?? HBO’s excellent twopart documentar­y “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” is an ideal entry point for those hoping to know more about Presley.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HBO HBO’s excellent twopart documentar­y “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” is an ideal entry point for those hoping to know more about Presley.

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