It’s hard to imagine two films more different than Elvis and Priscilla. The former, directed by Baz Luhrmann and released in 2022, charts the rise and fall of Elvis Presley on an operatic scale, zeroing in on his complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and presenting him as little less than pop’s greatest martyr. The latter, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir and released in the UK this week, is dreamy and intimate, focusing on the life of Priscilla as it related to Elvis, her partner of 14 years during the peak of his career. But which hewed closer to the facts?
The wonder of you: portrayals of the King
Three Elvis experts I spoke to agree that, in general, Austin Butler, who portrayed Elvis in Luhrmann’s film, did a better job of capturing the King’s mannerisms. Jeff Schrembs, owner of one of the largest private Elvis collections in the world, says that Butler “got a lot of Elvis’s dancing and hand movements right”, while Suzanne Finstad, author of Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, says Butler captured the feeling that Elvis was “complicated, charismatic yet compassionate, at times tender, but always conflicted”.
Finstad and Schrembs feel that Elvis as portrayed by Jacob Elordi in Priscilla was altogether more thinly drawn. “The character as written was, to me, very buffoonish,” says Finstad. “I thought that the entire Presley family in Priscilla almost came across as the Beverly Hillbillies, with Elvis as a kind of predatory Jethro Bodine. I didn’t feel the magic, the electricity, the sensitivity that Elvis had.”
Alanna Nash, author of four books about Elvis including The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley and Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him, says that Butler was “a knockout stage performer” but “did not have Elvis’s fine-featured beauty and never really got the speaking voice”. Elordi, on the other hand, although distractingly tall, “was spooky-good with Elvis’s low-grade mumble – the only actor to ever capture that correctly”.
Are you lonesome tonight: portrayals of Priscilla
Nash says that while Olivia DeJonge, who portrayed Priscilla in Elvis, was “charming”, she was ultimately “not very convincing as young Priscilla”. On the other hand, Coppola’s star, Cailee Spaeny, “was terrific in capturing that young girl wide-eyedness, and also in telegraphing the ennui of being ‘caged’ at Graceland as the woman always in waiting”.
However, Finstad points out that while Spaeny was “spot-on” in her portrayal of Priscilla once she arrives at Graceland – after she begins to style herself with a beehive and layers-upon-layers of fake lashes – Coppola’s depiction of pre-Elvis Priscilla as a relatively meek, mousy-haired girl who Elvis later made-over in his own image doesn’t gel with the facts. “Priscilla was very much into makeup and had very dark hair at the time that she met Elvis – it’s not as if he took a little brown wren and put all of this makeup on her and teased her hair and turned her into a different person,” she says. While Priscilla was made-over at Graceland to more closely resemble the look that Elvis liked, Finstad says she doesn’t “think that can be just laid at the feet of Elvis – it was something Priscilla was complicit in”, and that Coppola’s version of events “skews the reality, and adds to the feeling of something being slightly off in the relationship”.
Can’t help falling in love: Elvis and Priscilla’s first meeting
While Luhrmann only briefly depicts Elvis and Priscilla’s first meeting – perhaps so as not to have to deal with the fact that Priscilla was 14 at the time – Coppola’s film does, showing the moment when one of Elvis’s friends approaches her at a diner and asks her to attend a party at Elvis’s house, an idea that is strongly resisted by Priscilla’s parents.
Finstad says that, according to her research, Priscilla’s parents were actually “really gung ho” about their daughter’s relationship with Elvis. “Her mother was an Elvis fan before the family was transferred to Germany and she was ecstatic that Priscilla was dating him,” she says. “She had no problem at all with Priscilla spending nights in Elvis’s bedroom until midnight, 1am.”
Elvis’s entourage – the “Memphis Mafia” – do not express any concern about Priscilla’s age in either film, which Nash says was also a fiction. “The guys around Elvis were terrified,” she says, pointing to a section in her book Elvis and the Memphis Mafia in which the singer’s production manager, Lamar Fike, recalls telling Elvis: “We’ll end up in prison for life.”
Finstad also says that Priscilla’s Elvis fandom at the time is hugely downplayed in Coppola’s film. “She wanted to meet Elvis more than anything when she got to Germany. I found a newspaper article from the 1950s, and it quotes Priscilla as saying that she told her cousin her goal when she was in Germany was to meet Elvis Presley,” she says. “All of that is left out of [the film Priscilla], and it seems like a fairytale where some unnamed person just appears out of the ether and asks this young girl if she’d like to meet Elvis.”
A little less conversation: Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship
Both films portray the pair’s relationship as toxic and deeply fractured, although Coppola’s film, given that it centres on Priscilla, understandably delves into their dynamic more closely. Schrembs says that the second film correctly included “some gentle moments” in addition to the volatility. “There was a lot of that during their marriage – the way Elvis doted on her,” he says. “There was no doubt that he loved her, especially when she was pregnant with Lisa Marie.”
Nash says Coppola’s portrayal of Elvis as someone with a host of relative sexual pathologies – in the film, he largely pushes aside sex in favour of pillow fights and photoshoots with Priscilla – is “true, according to Priscilla’s earlier accounts, but he lost interest in her sexually only after Lisa was born. That said, he was never faithful to any one woman, ever.”
Finstad says that Elvis’s spirituality is largely glossed over or mocked in Coppola’s film, which diminishes how seriously he took it. “At a certain point in his career, when he was hugely famous, Elvis seriously thought about becoming a monk,” she says. “He was trying to deal with fame, and a lifestyle that was so different from his humble upbringing – and the way it’s presented in Priscilla, it’s minimised. The part that’s accurate is that Priscilla had zero interest in listening to Elvis discuss this.”
Luhrmann’s film, on the other hand, “gets that Elvis was really influenced by Black music and gospel music – that was in his soul. That’s completely lacking in Priscilla and as a result we get a superficial version of Elvis and Priscilla.”
Suspicious minds: final thoughts
According to Nash, neither film strikes the right balance in terms of portraying the complexities of the Presleys’ world. “Coppola’s film shows us none of their good times after Germany – the second half draws on all the negativity, to the point that it’s as if she never had any fun at all, with or without Elvis,” she says. “If the Luhrmann film is unfair to Colonel Parker, the Coppola is unfair to Elvis – by omission. Surely there is some middle ground between the blandness of Priscilla and the phantasmagoria of Elvis.”
Finstad says that while you come away from Luhrmann’s movie “feeling that you met Elvis Presley”, Coppola’s effort feels “kind of hollow, because the Elvis character is so one-dimensional that you don’t get a true sense of who the man was”.
“[Priscilla portrayed] the inappropriateness of the relationship between a 14-year-old and a grown man, and how in over her head she was as a young girl trying to compete with Ann-Margret and Juliet Prowse,” Finstad adds. “I think that part, it gets right.”
