Priscilla is the story of Priscilla Presley’s ten year relationship with Elvis Presley. It’s a 113-minute experience of sustained unpleasantness. Leaving the theater, The Wife asked, “How come we don’t know much about Priscilla after watching a movie titled PRISCILLA?” Mulling that over, I think that the answer is that there’s not much to learn about someone who was essentially maintained and treated as someone else’s pet.
Here’s the arc of the story. Already a multimillionaire superstar when he is drafted, Elvis’ Army service takes him to Germany. He meets, and is fascinated by, a 14-year-old ninth grader, Priscilla Beaulieu. (Yes, you’re right, this is really creepy.) He courts her, and, when she is still seventeen, moves her to Memphis to become his live-in girlfriend at Graceland. He, however, according to Priscilla, does not have sexual intercourse with her until they marry when she is 22. Priscilla is played by Cailee Spaeny and Elivis by Jacob Elordi.
Surrounding himself with yes men and enabled by great wealth, Elvis dominates everyone in his life except Colonel Parker. Elvis’ every whim is indulged, dangerous for someone so immature, selfish and TWISTED.
In the pre-Memphis segment of the movie, I squirmed in my seat at the overt grooming of this child. It’s sick and icky.
Any global sex symbol who can have tabloid affairs with Anita Ekberg, Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret, not to mention limitless groupies, can sweep a fifteen-year-old girl off her feet – if he is a sick enough bastard to WANT to. Elvis has the desires of any man (see Ann-Margret). But he also has a fantasy of marrying a virgin (it’s sacred to me, he says), and he goes pretty deep in the cradle to find one.
As the movie settles in Memphis, I shifted to my usual distaste of a controlling man dominating his woman, a woman whom he never allows to become his partner in any sense. He’s basically like the pathetic loser divorced guys who get mail order brides from the Philippines, in (vain) hopes of finding a submissive wife.
Spaeny shot the film when she was 24 (Elordi was 25) and is believable as a teenager. Spaeny is very believable as a young person whisked into a bizarre environment that no one could possible be prepared for.
Jacob Elordi, of course, has to play somebody that everyone in the audience has an indelible image of. He’s not bad, in that I was never thinking THAT’S not Elvis, but he’s nowhere is a good as Kurt Russell, the gold standard movie Elvis.
All the stuff in Priscilla at Graceland is surreal (which is what we would expect). If you know anything about Elvis, you spot the Memphis Mafia and the fried banana peanut butter sandwich.
Coppola herself wrote the screenplay, based on Priscilla Presey’s Elvis and Me, written with Sandra Harmon. A distinguished writer, Coppola won an Oscar for the Lost in Translation screenplay, and is known for telling familiar stories from a female point of view (The Beguiled, Marie Antoinette).
(I tend to look down at the trashiness and oversharing in celebrity memoirs. In fact, I haven’t bought the tell-all memoir of a contemporary celebrity since Ball Four by Jim Bouton in 1970. My curiosity is as prurient as anybody else’s, so I do read the news coverage of such books, to gobble up the juicy parts.)
Priscilla may be accurate storytelling, but it is not engaging storytelling. I’m an outlier here – Priscilla has a 77 rating on Metacritic. I suspect that’s because critics are overrating the film because they admire the director. The director is admirable, but not for this work.
[Note: The movie’s story ends in 1973, when Elvis was still trim, and I couldn’t help thinking that he was to die within four years. Priscilla herself is now 78.]
Priscilla, initially wowed by Elvis’ attentions and the privileges of great wealth, finally gets fed up by Elvis’ treatment and leaves him. That’s not enough of a pay off for an audience that has endured almost two hours of dysfunction and human debasement.