A star is born with Cailee Spaeny's portrayal of Priscilla Beaulieu, the 14-year-old schoolgirl who grew up to marry Elvis Presley, in Sofia Coppola’s ravishing and gothic tale of how teen dreams can very often turn toxic.
25-year-old Spaeny plays Priscilla - first as the painfully shy teenager who meets her idol at a party in his house near the US army base where he is based in Germany in 1959 and later as a young woman suffocated by his controlling nature and casual neglect.
This is a very different story to Baz Luhrmann’s exuberant Elvis biopic, revealing a darker, more self-destructive king of rock `n’ roll and telling the story of Priscilla’s awakening from her own delusions about the man she has married.
Written, directed, and produced by Coppola, it’s on based Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me and it plays like a kind of romantic fairytale with a very ugly undertow of coercive control.
Despite their pained reservations about the huge age gap and Elvis’ global fame, Priscilla’s parents eventually let their daughter live in Memphis and attend a nearby catholic school. However, she is left in the gilded cage of Graceland under the watchful eye of Elvis’ stern father Vernon as the King spends months on end in Hollywood making his mostly terrible movies and consorting with the likes of Ann-Margret and Nancy Sinatra.
When he is home, he is little more than a man child with a passion for gunplay and pill popping. Later there is a disastrous experimentation with LSD during Elvis’ short-lived interest in the counterculture. When the increasingly angry and isolated Priscilla confronts him about rumoured affairs with his glamorous and more womanly co-stars, she is met with threats and sullen silence.
It’s Spaeny’s movie through and through and her growth from an innocent teen, as delicate as porcelain doll, to a young woman who is so much more than a beehive and doe eyes is a very fine performance. At 6’ 5" Australian actor Elorid is certainly the tallest Elvis you’ll see and also the most domesticated. Elvis’ music does not feature in the movie (Coppola does her customary mix of vintage with more modern music), leaving Elorid to full explore a side of the star not often seen.
There’s more than a touch of southern gothic to Priscilla and it shares the same limpid and languid qualities of Coppola’s previous movies.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
