After the attention-deficient excess and rampant hero worship of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, a counterblast - although even that seems too crudely masculine and heavy-handed a word to capture the myriad delicacies of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla. The writer-director here fillets Elvis and Me, the 1985 memoir wherein Priscilla Presley revisited the circumstances by which she met and married the most famous man on the planet, as the basis of her latest not-quite-fairytale. It has a pre-eminent Prince Charming: bored, barely pubescent Army brat Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is fair swept off her daintily painted feet by the dashing megastar during his military service in West Germany in the late 1950s. This Prince, soon to be King, has his own castle, too, but having installed Priscilla in Graceland, our Elvis for the night (Jacob Elordi) hooks her on various pills, twists her round his finger like a yo-yo string and sets out to rebuild his career, leaving our heroine to endure the absences and infidelities. While ever-alert to the ritual of yesteryear, Coppola also knows we're looking on from the vantage of the present-day, and wiser to the ways of certain folk in the entertainment industry; she's vastly more interested in Elvis and Priscilla as flesh-and-blood than Luhrmann, who continues to trade almost exclusively in images and icons, and so she steers her film towards an investigation of exactly what kind of bond this couple had over the decade-and-a-half this scenario covers. "Promise me you'll stay the way you are," Elvis beseeches an already besotted 14-year-old Priscilla as he bids farewell for the first time at the end of his time in uniform. Hound dog, or devil in disguise?
This is what the onscreen Priscilla is trying to work out, like a starry-eyed Nancy Drew; it's just possible her offscreen counterpart wrote her memoir to establish where she stood after all those years. Coppola, an eternal equivocator, certainly isn't sure, which leaves this relationship intriguingly open to outside interpretation: this isn't the cut-and-dried grooming case our new movie puritans may have been praying for. If this Elvis is a monster, than he's no ordinary monster. One of the few new-generation leading men to look like the movie stars of yore (with, seemingly, the talent to back those looks up), Elordi ensures his King is upright and gracious, a good host, attentive company (when he's around) and not lacking in those gentlemanly qualities that have long been part of Elvis lore. But this Elvis was in the process of being automated and incorporated as we find him - hardened for showbiz battle - and so initially the movie hinges on the matter of what Priscilla might have meant to a thrusting young buck like him: apple-cheeked spoil of musical glory? A housewife in training, a baseline to return to after long months of filming and touring? A replacement for the idolising mother he loved and lost the year before the two met? If Coppola identifies anything so dastardly as a villain within these images, it may just be the overbearing conservatism of mid-century America, the constant need for discipline, order, control: we spy it in the familial channels of command these kids have to negotiate to go anywhere and do anything. Though notionally a free man, Coppola's Elvis looks as much a victim as anyone in this respect, kept firmly under the thumbs of his father Vernon and his manager Colonel Tom, stern-faced CEOs of ElvisCorp - an industry within an industry - set to making their boy an even bigger star (and thus make themselves more money). Priscilla, for her part, appears at least as cooped up at home as she does at Graceland, where she at least gets to be with the man she loves. It's all, well... complicated.
More so here because, even as Priscilla makes increasingly frequent reference to the hurt and pain incurred in the course of this formative relationship, it becomes abundantly clear that Coppola has fallen head over heels in love with this period in American history: the plush shagpile carpets and teletyped airline tickets, the roller derbies and Phil Spector records. Around a third of these 116 minutes is given over to what seems a running, month-by-month commentary on developments in ladies' fashion and cosmetics. How could you not be seduced?, the movie appears to ask in places. Would you honestly not be able to put up with Elvis at his worst so as to carry on enjoying a taste of the high life? Valid questions, yet I'll admit I found my interest beginning to drift around much the same time Priscilla's attraction to this life (and this lifestyle) began to wane. As with almost every other Sofia Coppola film in existence, Priscilla starts to turn in picturesque circles after a while; a dash of Luhrmann's propulsion might have been beneficial, and its decisive final movement feels curiously truncated. Coppola can't quite connect this Elvis and this Priscilla to the wash-up and the wisecracking broad we know they became; she has to leave them young and pretty, for the purposes of her own aesthetic. What development there is here centres chiefly on the lead actress's face. Initially, Spaeny strikes the eye as a perfect doll - both Elvis and Sofia have fun dressing her up - but she sustains this camera's close scrutiny to the last, her features seeming to deepen and darken as the character finds herself ever more direly trapped behind enemy lines. What Coppola sees there, I think, is what she must have seen in the real Priscilla's source material: that internal growth - the slow subconscious gathering, sorting and storing of wisdom - that takes place in trying circumstances, and especially amidst the indifference of careless, cavalier men, and which often results in a gal outlasting them all. In its most persuasive phases, Priscilla offers thoughtful consideration to a question American movies have never really troubled to ask: what did Elvis leave behind whenever he left the building?
Priscilla is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment