Critic Reviews

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

A documentary as sprawling and brilliant and flawed as the country it traverses, Eugene Jarecki’s The Promised Land is a fascinatingly overstuffed portrait of America in decline.

Elvis achieved a skyrocketing success previously unseen in pop culture, and then became his own victim by letting it get away from him. As Jarecki proves with this extended, sometimes bumpy, but still worthy metaphor, it’s the same with the U.S. We’ve been coasting along for so many years, taking democracy for granted, that the entire structure of the nation is now in peril.

Perceptive, probing and ultimately devastating, The King is for anyone who cares about where this country has been and where it’s headed.

Wildly ambitious, thoroughly entertaining and embellished with some snaky moves, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is a lot like its nominal subject, Elvis Presley.

As he proves again, few directors have Jarecki's skill for pulling a massive stack of disparate themes – race, celebrity, power, wealth, drug addiction, poverty, militarism – into one coherent narrative.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this random, scattershot, overreaching movie stops spinning its wheels and starts flying on a cumulative power that floors you. But when it happens – kapow! By the end we’re looking at Elvis, America and ourselves with new eyes and wondering, once again, if the truth really can set us free.

By the time Jarecki is done with Elvis, the lanky, and projects-raised, rockabilly kid just one generation removed from sharecroppers has been cast as everything from an opportunist and grasping capitalist to addled addict to just plain sucker. If he ever was the King, the movie suggests, it’s long past time to retire the crown.

Jarecki uses Elvis Presley’s career and influence to help us make sense of fame, power, corruption, self-destructive behaviour and pretty much all the other ills of the world.

Promised Land deftly flits from biography to impact study to cinematic essay on the boom and bust of happiness-peddling myths, drawing a clear line from the music king to the current US leader.