Baz Luhrman, in his biopic ELVIS, decides to introduce Elvis Presley the only way he could be imagined, on-stage strumming a guitar, about to spring into the role of the rockstar. Elvis stands on the stage with his greasy hair and ‘girly’ make-up, which are perceived as somewhat strange. And as he stands nervously, Elvis is mocked by the audience. Mocked he had been all his life, mocked for being a freak, mocked for being poor, mocked for his association with Black music and friends (something that was considered highly unorthodox during the period). But in that moment of being mocked, you can see a visible shift in Elvis and he erupts absolutely. Elvis was a born entertainer and as he played, “Baby, Let’s Play House” on stage, its effects quite clearly reflected among his audience. The hips don’t lie and soon enough, everyone is consumed by the hysteria of the senses- a hysteria that follows Elvis throughout his career. This, in essence, sums up Baz Luhrman’s idea of Elvis Presley, ostentatiously titled, the king of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
ELVIS (2022) – the biopic, written and directed by Baz Luhrman looks at Elvis as more of a phenomenon that occurred to music than an individual in his own right. The central plot casts Elvis, played by Austin Butler, as the victim of a powerful and bloodsucking enemy- his manager, Col. Tom Parker, whose voice-over by Tom Hanks shapes the narrative. It is popularly known that Elvis was exploited by his manager, both emotionally and physically, and many fans have speculated that the reason behind Elvis’s death was the contract he was bound under. “I didn’t kill Elvis,” Tom Hank’s Parker says, though Luhrman seems to imply otherwise. “I made Elvis.” Parker insists throughout the movie that Elvis and him were good partners throughout Elvis’s very successful career.
As a Presley biopic, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. Who truly was Elvis? To me, the movie doesn’t answer that. It is an adornment of his style, his glitz and glam than it is about the subject. The story is flashy but hardly lasts.
Elvis was considered the most famous, and greatest singing entertainer the world had ever seen. But he was also a humanely flawed man with some contentious issues, including his long-standing relationship with his ex-wife, Priscilla Presley. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) goes on to explore these layers in Elvis, the man beyond just the performer, and gives a much richer take on the rockstar.
Based on the 1985 book, Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, it takes us on a whirlwind ride with delectable cinematography and masterful performances. Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley are the perfect casting choices. They both share palpable chemistry as they occupy the positions of their larger-than-life counterparts. Cailee Spaeny does so much without saying anything at all. It is through her eyes that we find the narration of a divinely feminist tale. Coppola lingers on Spaeny’s face as she is consumed by the large world of Elvis’s stardom. It is the story of a teen girl with a crush whose life spirals out of control before she is even able to grapple with the world of fame she is so abruptly thrust into. Priscilla was just a girl, smitten head over heels with a rockstar, a living king among men, and wanting to be desired in the eyes of the one she considered an idol. Spaeny is quick to catch this innocence of a first crush, the heartbreak of a fantasy. As Priscilla is slowly groomed, prepped, and delicately placed in the narrative of Presley’s celebrity, your heart breaks a little. She is a prisoner in the house he barely occupies. It is in utter despair that we watch her occupy the threshold of Elvis’s life, his words shaping her entire existence, controlling the way she looks, the clothes she wears, and the company she surrounds herself with.
Priscilla as a biopic holds indescribable beauty. Coppola very smartly subverts the idyllic life of fame and transforms it into a portrait of isolation. Coppola shows a dream, a fantasy that evaporates as innocence is robbed and the emptiness, the reality settles in. I found myself dwelling on Priscilla long after the credits had rolled. The more I pondered, the more I was forced to sit with this deep-rooted feeling of debauchery and betrayal in my gut.
In ELVIS, Luhrman seems committed to an idea of Elvis that was perhaps most prominent in front of an audience. Butler doesn’t seem to go beyond the physicality of Elvis, the performer. The vulnerability is culpable but not fully realized. Coppola’s Elvis holds more girth. As Elordi taps into an intriguing, quixotic cruelty beneath the charisma; his Elvis becomes a dangerously complicated creature and occupies a much darker sphere in the minds of the audience than Butler’s sunnier version. Butler’s version does not hold Priscilla in much regard as she has just a 10-minute segment in the movie, perhaps in lieu of how much of Elvis’s grand life story she actually occupied.
Coppola truly is a genius of a storyteller. She acts as an empathetic observer of Priscilla’s story and is very careful at handling the intricacies of her relationship with Elvis. Elvis is a product of his time, and women, in his experience, are uncomplaining homemakers, and he expects the same reverence and compliance from Priscilla. In choosing herself at the end of Priscilla, she leaves the little girl that used to hang on every word of Elvis’s and is reborn as a woman of her own will. It is perhaps then not in reaction to “Elvis” that “Priscilla” should be viewed but seen as stories that add to each other and delve into the question of Elvis and the man he truly was.