‘Priscilla’ and ‘Elvis’

Talk about he said, she said. The Elvis Presley mythos gets a gimlet-eyed rebuke with last week’s release of the new Sofia Coppola film Priscilla, a quietly devastating takedown of the hip-shaking musical quasar-superstar through the eyes of his not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman bride née Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny). It’s a welcome counter-factual and surprisingly necessary complement to last year’s Baz Luhrman spectacular-spectacular Elvis, a Hellzapoppin’ hagiography that uses every kitchen-sink CGI tool to maximize the adulation.

Like any dysfunctional relationship, the two feisty but flawed movies need each other to paint a fuller picture of the pop-culture tragedy that was their turbulent relationship. What cinematic kismet that both were released so close to each other. ‘Elvis‘ is the fentanyl drug-rush overdose; ‘Priscilla’ is the Narcan nasal-spray antidote.

Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes, and this Double Trouble double feature gives a richly doubled-sided double take at the King of Rock n’ Roll. Both films are a feast of personal exploitation: Luhrman shows how Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) sees Elvis as a cash cow worth milking until his jumpsuited, drug-addicted teats were raw. And Coppola shows how Elvis sees Priscilla as the one thing in his life that he can mold, shape, order around and otherwise lock up in a gilded cage. Both movies are about abusive control, and both show how that iron grip becomes not just disfiguring but ultimately unsustainable.

The two films also show a time and a culture that was naïve about the exploitation and therefore fully accepting of it. Of course Elvis’ manager was ripping off his artist; that’s what had happened in the music industry for decades. Of course Priscilla’s husband dictated her every move, exploited their age differences for emotional manipulation, and, as breadwinner, had the final say in all her life choices. She dyes her hair black and wears the clothes he commands. Men were in charge, women were supine.

What’s so edifying is to see how Luhrman and Coppola contradict each other’s representations of the same encounters—most of all at the origin of their love affair. In Elvis, the courtship between Elvis (Austin Butler) and Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) during his military service in Germany is brash and romantic, with him revealing his personal vulnerabilities and her giving nothing but eager support. In Priscilla, the predatory grooming is laid bare, with parental permission a constant refrain from Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) and her age (fourteen!) a blaring klaxon.

What’s wild is how different the women look in the two films. At 25, DeJonge and Spaeny are the same age. But Luhrman never makes her look younger than her actual age—a fully developed, clearly adult woman. Coppola shows Spaeny’s maturation, starting in 1959 and going into the ’70s, with forensic exactitude. When she’s a girl, she looks and acts like a girl. “He’s going to be gone in a few months,” she snipes at her parents in Germany. “Please don’t ruin my life.” And there’s no eroticizing the chemistry between her and Elvis (Jacob Eldori). Her 14-year-old Priscilla isn’t jailbait; she’s the embodiment of statutory rape.

To his somewhat dubious credit, the Elvis in Priscilla doesn’t have sex with her until she’s old enough for them to legally marry. But even more fascinating is how he doesn’t really care about sex with her and actively seems to avoid it—either by feigning exhaustion or referring to how it needs to be “sacred” between them. If anything, Coppola shows how horny Priscilla is and how little it seems to matter to Elvis—who is clearly oversexed anyway from countless infidelities with everyone from Ann-Margaret to Nancy Sinatra. Priscilla embodies something else for Elvis: maybe it’s normalcy, maybe innocence, maybe it’s just anything other than his glitz-smeared existence.

Coppola’s strength is in illustrating so vividly how the two of them are really just kids. Elvis and Priscilla go to roller rinks and jump in bumper cars, then have golf cart races at Graceland. He buys her handguns without a second thought and feeds her uppers and downers with impunity. He’s pill-popping and gun-popping like crazy—why shouldn’t she? But the dynamic is so asymmetric. Even their height is an imbalance. In Lurhman’s world, Elvis (Butler at 6’) is just a bit taller than Priscilla (DeJonge at 5’3”). In Coppola’s version, Elvis (Eldori, a towering 6’5”) looms over Spaeny (a lilliputian 5’1”).

But what Coppola is missing, what she doesn’t even explore, is the musical Elvis. Due to rights restrictions, and because her portrait of Elvis wasn’t flattering, she couldn’t secure any of his recordings for the film. She turns that to an aesthetic advantage—her Elvis, stripped of his superpower, automatically seems so much smaller, more petty, and borderline pathetic. But its absence still leaves its mark and makes it difficult to understand why Priscilla would be so enthralled by this otherwise eccentric but generic celebrity.

What Lurhman gets right with such bullseye accuracy is the immense, galvanic authority of Elvis’ place in the firmament of rock music—and why his dominance is still so relevant even now. And that’s what makes the moment when Priscilla chooses a freeing divorce instead of marital servitude so heart-wrenching for both of them. Luhrman’s Elvis is a blazing tragedy. Coppola’s Priscilla is a dark victory. But the unintentional diptych is proof that the two movies make beautiful music together.