ELVIS Review: We Can’t Go on Together with Suspicious Minds

By: Eric Darsie

There are a few movies that get me excited when I hear that are out in theaters, more so when I watch their trailers. When I heard there was a biopic done on the career of Elvis Presley, the late King of Rock and Roll, my interest was peaked.

In college, Elvis was one of the first artists I got into on my own and dove head-first into his catalog. Saying I liked Elvis Presley is an understatement. My college friends expected to hear me sing several Elvis songs to different ladies and different friends, depending on the situation, trying my best to serenade the beautiful ladies or irritate my buddies.

At the end of May 2022 I stumbled upon the trailer to the new ELVIS movie, coming out in theaters on Friday, June 24th , I became excited because I was taking the following two weeks off from work for a vacation. So, I made plans to bring my Mother to our local movie theater to see the new ELVIS movie on the first Tuesday that I was on vacation.

Being billed at a tad over two hours in length, I was hesitate on seeing the movie because sitting down for that length without a break to get up and move around is always hard for anyone. I’m used to walking anywhere between eight and twelve miles a day for my job, so sitting down for a two plus hour movie would be daunting for me. Hearing great reviews about Tom Hanks playing Col. Parker and Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, I decided it’d be worth it, more so because of the love I had for Elvis Presley, his music, and him as a performer when I was in my early 20s in college.

I enjoyed how the movie explained Elvis’ upbringing, being influenced by African American music and a traveling church revival, besides having a poverty-ridden childhood, and how Colonel Tom Parker met Elvis and became his manager, revealing to the young Presley that he, the Colonel, worked for the carnival and is known as a “huckster” and wants to bring the carnival to the music business, finding someone who could bring the show town-to-town, like the traveling circus.

What touched my heart while watching ELVIS was how moved Elvis was when Martin Luther King Junior and President John F. Kennedy were assassinated. The reason why it moved me that Elvis was affected by both events (besides MLK Jr. being assassinated in his hometown of Memphis and JFK being assassinated in Dallas – both towns being in the south during the time of the segregation issue in the United States), made Elvis seem and feel more relatable – that Elvis played the music he wanted to play and it didn’t matter if it didn’t match the color of his skin and it didn’t matter if it’s the music society wanted him to play.

Besides that, this movie did a great job explaining the stresses of the music business and what got to the man behind the “King of Rock and Roll.” As mentioned, Colonel Parker wanted Elvis to stop shaking his hips and getting all the ladies excited in the crowd because of the bad press they were getting coast to coast in the newspapers and elsewhere. Besides his personal and professional relationship with the Colonel, everything over time got to Elvis because of the demands on trying to change him from the man (and the music he wants to play) that he is into someone who he felt wasn’t him. That was another time when I felt like I could relate to Elvis.

Not that I work in the music industry, but with everyday work life and work stresses, anyone could relate to Presley that any job turns people into individuals who aren’t themselves. Towards the end of the film (and oddly enough towards the end of Elvis’ life), Elvis started to realize the con man who really was Colonel Parker. Elvis started to figure out that Colonel Parker isn’t who he led Presley on to be and wanted to fire him from being his management, but the Colonel wrote out what Elvis and the Presley Estate would be broke because of what they would owe the Colonel for his services in Elvis’ career. That seemly drug Elvis more into depression (besides losing his wife and daughter because the music industry pulled him away from his family – along with the drug use and abuse).

Around this time of the movie, Elvis started to play “Suspicious Minds” during his stay in Las Vegas at the International Hotel. The first three stanzas speaks volumes of where Elvis was facing in the film, and assumingly, facing in real life during this time frame:

We’re caught in a trap

I can’t walk out

Because I love you too much baby

What can’t you see

What you’re doing to me

When you don’t believe a word I say?

We can’t go on together

With suspicious minds

And we can’t build our dreams

On suspicious minds

The reason why “Suspicious Minds” got my philosophical mind a thinking because Elvis wanted to get away from singing Christmas songs and staring in films that don’t fulfill him as a person. Elvis wanted to go back to his roots and play music that made him happy – not be the person that all his entourage expect and demand him to be because Elvis was their cash cow.

Besides that, we see an interview that Elvis gave not that long before he passed away. In the clip, Elvis said: “When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times… I learned very early in life that: ‘Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain’t got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend – without a song.’ So I keep singing a song. Goodnight. Thank you.”

The reason why that touched my heart because Elvis had the same connection as I did to his music. His music gave him meaning, as well as it gave his fans, and the world, meaning. Everyone relates to music. Everyone loves music. It doesn’t have to be Elvis. It doesn’t have to be BB King or Little Richard (who played roles in the movie). Music touches us and it touched Elvis.

That’s why I highly suggest seeing ELVIS if you haven’t. If you were waiting for that review to convince you to go see it, hopefully this review is it. Either way, I am more than happy to be able to see the movie with my Mother, who I was asking questions for the rest of the night, picking her brain on what she remembers from the last twenty two years of his life before he passed away (she was 22 when he passed).

I want to conclude this article with a Elvis quote that I feel like is fitting, because it was uttered by Elvis in 1977 during his last tour: “’Til we meet again, may God bless you. Adios.”

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