The ordinary, the extraordinary, and Priscilla
Kara Kennedy
Sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back at famous and powerful men only to realize that we have done their dutiful wives a disservice. Take F. Scott Fitgerald and Zelda. She was far more interesting and insightful than her husband ever was. Her books and substantial influence on her husband resulted, nonetheless, in her being shoved into the background: the wife of. In 2023, she’d have been recognized for what she was, and her husband would’ve been the supporting act. In fact, it’s become almost the default assumption that behind every famous man is an overlooked woman who, if she were given a proper hearing, would be found to be special. When longtime bachelor George Clooney finally married hotshot human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin after decades in the dating game, the jokes about how she was the one settling poured in. But being a new cliche doesn’t make it any truer than being an old one, and it is important to remember that the wife in a couple is perfectly capable of being the less interesting, the less artistically honest — in one way or another, just the lesser one.
In June 2023, Elvis by Baz Luhrmann came out, starring Austin Butler in a glitzy, breathless biopic about the life and times of the King, whose hip-shaking magic young audiences were encouraged to feel, like their parents and grandparents past. Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola could not let that stand, and she’s now replying with Priscilla, the feminist rebuttal to Lurhmann’s film based on the woman behind the man, the wife of Elvis Presley for six years. Priscilla was created, in part, because Coppola said she realized “how little we know about her.”
Priscilla is not quite about the life and times of the onetime Mrs. Presley so much as it is about the slice of her life she spent with Elvis. It opens on a 14-year-old Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) the day she’s invited by a mysterious Army figure that the film never quite explains to meet the star while she’s sat alone at a diner in U.S.-occupied post-war West Germany. (Why was she chosen? Why didn’t Elvis ask her directly? Was a shy, pubescent schoolgirl a specific request by Elvis?) And the credits roll as a grown-up-ish Priscilla exits Graceland and their marriage with daughter Lisa-Marie Presley in hand to Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. Priscilla’s story ends when her connection to Elvis ends. Nothing of her later life — her turbulent relationships, including with Robert Kardashian or Marco Garibaldi — is touched upon. For Coppola, she is Elvis’s wife. And for the audience, we are left with far more questions than we started.
Coppola’s film fills in some of the blanks of the early days of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship. Unlike Luhrmann’s homage to her husband, focused on his heyday, Priscilla takes over an hour of screen time for the film’s namesake to even graduate high school, a Catholic one that Elvis enrolled her in after he convinced Priscilla’s parents to let her move to the graceless prison that is Graceland. Coppola’s lens scarcely lets you forget just how young Priscilla was, with Elvis saying, “You’re just a baby,” and Spaeny playing teenage innocence so effectively that it’s hard to believe she is 25. But there’s something missing, something that is perhaps buried too far between the lines.
For a work based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Elvis & Me, created to present Priscilla’s side of the story, Priscilla gives its title character noticeably little dialogue, often reduced to docile “hellos,” with more of an emphasis on her physical characteristics. Her feet, small and perfectly manicured, take up the opening shot. There’s her beehive, which grows throughout the film but is noticeably smaller than the real Priscilla’s, and her false eyelashes, which she applies even while in labor with Lisa-Marie. The film strives to present Elvis as her oppressor, with him having a fierce interest in women’s clothes and often telling Priscilla things like “That doesn’t suit you,” something that it seems likelier an aggrieved woman may remember a man making her feel like he said than to have actually happened.
Coppola is complicit. She poses as a liberator of Priscilla, but with the inclusion of trivial, ultrafeminine symbolism and weak dialogue, she is more like a decoy. She transforms Priscilla from a mod-dressed mystery into a meek, forgettable figure of no real substance at all.
While the film is beautifully shot, what Coppola fails to do is tell the story of Elvis’s abuse with her whole chest. She attempts to reframe history by alluding to what has always been whispered about Elvis but never shouted, and what we end up with is something in between: a yelp between gritted teeth. What Sofia wanted to say, what she read in Priscilla’s memoir, is that Elvis was somewhat of a monster and Priscilla was too naive to notice then, or at least too torn up to admit it later, even now, in this movie she executive produced. This is most evident — most brazen — in the scene with Elvis launching a chair at Priscilla’s head, narrowly missing, after she dared to share her opinion about a record. (He asked!) The only thing anyone says is “Watch out,” suggesting people have become accustomed to violence around the house. Or there’s one when Elvis accidentally overdoses her on the sleeping pills he was addicted to, resulting in her not waking up for two whole days. Both situations are treated with a palpable nonchalance by the Memphis Mafia, the impenetrable circle of friends and family that Elvis surrounded himself with and whose members, in turn, policed Priscilla. It took two days for someone to ask if they might bother to call a doctor to check on the drugged-up unconscious teenager.
Whatever really happened, and I bet we will never know, Priscilla will leave you none the wiser about the true thoughts and feelings of the wife of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll aside from what dresses she liked to wear and the color of her favorite nail polish. By the time she finally leaves Graceland, after total abandonment and multiple cheating scandals (including a time Elvis got engaged to actress Ann-Margret while filming Viva Las Vegas), we are expected to erect a statue of Priscilla next to Susan B. Anthony. The problem is that we are left confused, not particularly rooting for Priscilla because the truth is, we still know nothing about her apart from the fact that she was the wife of Elvis.
What did we learn after this brutal, beautiful, tender tale of suffering, the camera lingering on every soft shadow and moral gray area? This is why you should not make an exposé about the secret, harsh truth of the life of a woman who is also signed on as the executive producer of the film. And this is why you should not make a rebuttal film about somebody who just isn’t extraordinary.
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Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in the Spectator, the New Statesman, Tatler, the Daily Telegraph, and others.