Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
Director: Jeanie
Finlay
Writer: Jeanie
Finlay
Featuring: Jimmy
Ellis
Rating: Three and a
half stars out of five
Available on demand
now.
Hope, the belief in
potential, is part of what make people great. It makes you have faith
in yourself to do something difficult, or special, or novel. It gives
you the ability to bet on yourself, to think that, with a serving of
good fortune, you will get somewhere in life. It, in turn, make you
look on other people and see the possibility of goodness within them,
and trust that they can do fascinating, worthwhile things with the
time they have here. It is an aspirational inclination, and one that
helps keep the wheels churning on the humanity bus.
But hope is not
everything. It can't be, because its downside can get ugly in a
hurry. It can create a blinding effect, erecting a mental block in
the minds of those who cannot turn off the inclination. This is
particularly true when someone who has followed through on their
potential loses their hold on it, be it through the erosion of skills
that accompanies aging, through a cynical and/or insecure throwing
away of one's talents, or through death. That last one, nobody gets
away from.
And so was the case
for Elvis Presley, who combined the latter two items of the preceding
list to die at the age of 42 on August 16, 1977, of a heart attack
brought on by years of drug and alcohol abuse. His was a life that
showed fans it was possible to max out their potential and gain love,
fame, power, and probably even the elusive brand of immortality that
comes with synthesizing into being a new art form. But the man hit a
Las Vegas-sized wall and it all ended ignominiously. It was over. It
was time to find another figure for the adoring masses to attach
their hopes and dreams to.
However, in its
depressing clockwork fashion, the entertainment industry, nor many of
Presley's fans, did not want to let go. It was easy and comforting to
keep the dream alive, even if the ambulatory pair of bloated
sideburns was not.
Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
tells the story about the ugliness of that inability to let go of the
hope people assigned to Elvis, by making a sideshow freak/cash-in out
of a talented – if not uniquely so, given his uncanny vocal
similarities to the King – singer named Jimmy Ellis. He traveled
the country for years after Presley's death while wearing a
Zorro-style mask to give the appearance that this “tall drink of
water,” as at least two people call him to documentarian Jeanie
Finlay's camera, was the man himself, in some sort of
resurrection/faked death conspiracy.
People
who knew Ellis in the days before, during, after, during again, and
after again – he gave up the mantle for a time in the mid-1980s –
his time as the masked myth detail his talents, his struggles with
women, his desire to be his own man. However, his voice would not let
that happen, even if he had never gone along with the marketing
scheme that made him a bizarre piece of pop Americana. To an
untrained ear, Ellis was Presley's clone, the type of talent who
could have been transformational if he had been lucky enough to have
been born 15 years earlier. Instead, he was perhaps always destined
to be a novelty act, a niche performer who halfway lucked out
financially (for a time) thanks to the soul-crushing deal he made
with the suits at his record label.
Archival
footage of Ellis's faux-Elvis career plays over most of the
interviews, with some tinny recordings of Ellis's own thoughts on his
cult status. The art vs. commerce debate happens subtly, and it
implies Ellis probably needed commerce more than art. It's a handsome
package, and it obviously generated hundreds of words about hope at
the outset of this review, but Orion is
a standard piece of documentary filmmaking that errs on the side of
letting the interview subjects color the viewers' understanding of
the person at its center. People disagree about what made Ellis tick,
of course, and that is helpful as a way of showing how one can mean
different things to different people.
Thematically,
all that would have still made for a solid movie. But Orion
falters by displaying hardly any
investigative pushback against a crackpot theory about Ellis's
paternity, letting the hope of the interviewees and fans take over.
If the theory is correct, it would mean Ellis was no fraud, but a
true heir. It's a “print the legend” piece of sensationalism the
rest of the film lacks and does not need, particularly after showing
numerous instances of journalists at the time debunking the sham that
Orion the singer was not the reanimated Elvis. It is keeping with the
documentary's thesis to present this hopeful fantasy, but it comes
off as irresponsible and opportunistic enabling of unhealthy thoughts
and behavior.
Orion
remains thoughtful – and borderline revelatory about human nature –
despite its flaws, and it nimbly explores its subject for most of its
runtime. It could stand to add a few extra minutes to tamp down some
delusions, or at least cast a bit of doubt on them, but maybe it
would be a mistake to take that faith out of it.
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