Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.