The King

Gael Garcia Bernal is elusive as Elvis in The King.

Herald rating: * *

When we first meet Elvis Valderez (Garcia Bernal), he is a fresh-faced boy, delighted at his honourable discharge from the Navy. "I'm gonna go home," he tells his bunkmate.

But "home" turns out to be a place he's never been: Corpus Christi, Texas, near the Mexican border, where Pastor David Sandow (Hurt) presides over a showbiz-style fundamentalist church.

He tells the pastor he is his illegitimate son, the issue of a youthful indiscretion with a Mexican girl. The pastor, who has not kept this fact secret from his wife or his God, suggests they meet later but, before they can, Elvis embarks on a campaign to destroy his father's life, beginning by seducing his devout 16-year-old half-sister, Malerie.

So far, so quasi-Oedipal. But Garcia Bernal, who demonstrated in The Motorcycle Diaries his difficulty with depicting the inner life, remains a closed book to us. We know nothing of his back story, his childhood, his mother's fate.

The script - co-written by director Marsh and Milo Addica, who wrote the excellent Nicole Kidman vehicle Birth - reworks the idea that drove two versions of Cape Fear but we knew why Max Cady was mad; we can't understand the source of Elvis' icy, expressionless, psychopathic rage, and his acts seem offhand, almost accidental, rather than purely malevolent.

And, notwithstanding the actor's heartthrob status, Malerie's rapid transformation from devout, naive Texas girl to sex kitten strains credibility, too.

The film's symbology, from the name of the city where it's set to the decision to make Elvis' target a man of God, seems clunky and deliberate and it unfolds with a formulaic predictability.

We long to know something more of the characters - the film manages to extract an opaque performance from the usually brilliant Hurt - but instead they are figures in an unsubtle and inconclusive morality play.

Verdict: An attempt at a modern tragedy with Oedipal overtones fails because Garcia Bernal's villain is a two-dimensional figure whose inner life is a mystery

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, William Hurt, Pell James, Laura Harring, Paul Dano
Director: James Marsh
Running Time: 105 minutes
Rating: R16, Contains violence and sex scenes
Screening: Academy