So, Priscilla Presley the origin story, authorised version. Priscilla director and adapter Sofia Coppola isn’t out to bust any myths here, taking the onetime wife of Elvis, Priscilla Presley (an executive producer of this movie) at her word, or at the word of her 1985 biography Elvis and Me, at any rate. The result walks the line between high-end hack work and a prison-break drama, albeit one dressed to within an inch of its life.
It’s the soup to nuts version of Priscilla’s life with the King – 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley, the most famous man in the world, while he’s stationed in West Germany on military service in 1959. He courts her in an old-fashioned way, wins around her parents and by the time she’s 16 she’s installed at Elvis’s home, Graceland. There she becomes a cog in the wheel of the Elvis operation and over time starts to realise that there’s nothing in this relationship for her beyond worldly goods. She is there to support Elvis, to be the good wife, even in the face of his affairs with the co-stars on his movies. Self-fulfilment obviously not on the menu, Priscilla quits Graceland and her marriage – Elvis’s wife has left the building.
So was Elvis pressing his hunk-a-hunk-a-burning-love on Priscilla when she was 14, 15, 16, or whichever jailbait age you want to reach for? Priscilla’s book says no and so does the movie. Coppola has a cute way with facts like these, essentially giving them to us straight and then nodding over towards Priscilla Presley with a “well that’s what she says”. It suits both parties. Cake is eaten and still possessed.
Make no mistake, this is not a film about Elvis by a different route. He’s a supporting character in Priscilla’s story and the picture painted of him is not a sugary one. In Coppola’s reading, Elvis is a dim sentimental pill-popping yokel surrounded by an endlessly whooping gaggle of jock friends. His attachment to Priscilla verges on the creepily Oedipal – when he suggests what clothes she should wear they’re always those of the older woman.
Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter Lisa Marie was vehemently against the film ever being made because of the way Elvis was portrayed. She died (luckily) before it came out. But for much of the movie you might think Priscilla is being assessed in an equally damning way – the bird in the gilded cage, the woman who lives her life subject to the whims of her husband. But she was very, very young, let’s remember, and at the point Elvis lays it on the line for her in words she cannot misinterpret – “I need a woman who understands that things like this [affairs] can happen. Are you going to be her or not?” – she finally realises exactly what the deal is with Elvis and wants out.
Coppola fetishes the externals of the couple’s existence. Starting with a shot of bare feet on a very plush carpet, she drinks in the furniture, the fancy 1950s tech, the cars, the clothes and the drapes, as well as all the paraphernalia associated with being a womanly woman – hair dye, nail varnish, curlers and so on. Because the Elvis estate wouldn’t play ball, Coppola can also play a favourite game of hers, using anachronistic music, as she did in Marie Antoinette. So: the Ramones and Spectrum on the soundtrack.
Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi play Priscilla and Elvis. She’s particularly good at playing young Priscilla, with little flicks of the head the telltale that for all this young woman’s maturity, poise and determination there’s a lack of self-confidence. Elordi gets the voice of Elvis and some of the movements but he’s physically too elongated to convince as Elvis and seems either slightly overwhelmed by the task, or possibly underwhelmed by the thin gruel he’s been given to work with.
Elordi’s performance is indicative of the whole movie. Coppola shows us the world of Priscilla, Elvis and the strange hothouse of Graceland, brilliantly, but does not immerse us in it. We see but we do not understand.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
