ELVIS IS EVERYWHERE: THE THING CALLED LOVE, TRUE ROMANCE
Ever since Elvis Aron Presley walked into Sun Studios in the mid-1950's and declared, "I don't sound like anybody," he's become a cultural icon. Whether you prefer old Elvis, movie Elvis, Vegas Elvis, country Elvis, or gospel Elvis, as Mojo Nixon once put it, Elvis is indeed everywhere. Two 1993 movies sort of reflected this; in Peter Bogdanovich's THE THING CALLED LOVE, one of the characters shared Presley's last name, while in Tony Scott's TRUE ROMANCE, written by Quentin Tarantino, the main character not only worshipped Elvis, but also "talked" to him, using him as a guide. Both movies are worth seeing, though the latter more than the former.
Today, THE THING CALLED LOVE is more known as being one of the last films River Phoenix made before dying of drug-related conditions in October of '93. The fact that Samantha Mathis, his co-star in the film, was his girlfriend at the time probably doesn't help there either. That's too big a load to carry for this uneven but sweet film.
Mathis plays Miranda Presley (no relation), who comes down to Nashville to try and make it as a country singer/songwriter (in Nashville, you can make it doing either/or, as well as both). She ends up at a bar owned by Lucy (real-life country singer K.T. Oslin), who runs a contest every week and prints the lyrics of the winner. Lucy tells Miranda she's not a bad songwriter, but she needs to dig deeper (one of her first songs is about a woman with big bar hair, which Lucy thinks anyone could have written). One person who does dig deeper, and who takes an interest in her, is James (Phoenix), a more successful country singer/songwriter. Miranda also falls in with Linda Lue (Sandra Bullock), a former beauty queen trying to make it as a singer, and Kyle (Dermot Mulroney), who seems content just to live the country life, even though he's a singer/songwriter as well. Miranda is in love with James, while Kyle is attracted to Miranda, and Linda Lue is attracted to Kyle. As for James, he's battling his own demons.
One type of music Hollywood has never really understood is country music, and I must confess for a long time I never really understood it either. To me, country music was always summed up in three songs: Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee," Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man," and Hank Williams Jr.'s "There's a Tear in my Beer." Country, however, can be just as personal and emotional as any other music, and certainly it has strong ties to blues, folk, and yes, rock. Bogdanovich showed in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW how sympathetic he is towards country music, and he and writer Carol Heikkinen show it here. Presley talks about how her father instilled in her a love of country, even though she lived in New York. And there are plenty of country artists either acting in small parts (along with Oslin, rockabilly singer Webb Wilder plays the owner of the motel Miranda stays at), or as themselves (among them Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Pam Tillis, and Trisha Yearwood), lending the movie verisimillitude. And all the songs are performed well.
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