Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmara Dominczyk, Tim Post, Lynne Griffin
Intro:
... the acting’s fine, the production values are pretty good, and – the odd minor musical anachronism aside – so is the sense of time and place. But nor is there anything especially notable or memorable about it.
This is a biopic, based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. As such, it’s a strictly linear movie. It starts in 1959, when the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis the G.I. at an American air force base in West Germany; he’s 24, and of course already stratospherically famous. And it ends when she leaves him in 1972. What’s in between is not glitzy or upbeat, and though the soundtrack is terrific, Elvis’s own music is conspicuous by its almost total absence – appropriately so in the claustrophobic and largely homebound story of his girlfriend and eventual wife.
The keynotes here are control, domination and a massive power imbalance. For a long time, while Elvis is arguably grooming the innocent Priscilla, the unsavoury situation makes for tense and uncomfortable viewing. It’s not quite all relationship stuff though: there are snapshots of Elvis’s hangers-on (the so-called Memphis Mafia), side trips to Vegas, dabblings in spiritual hokum and early hints of Presley’s eventual gargantuan drug problem … Who knows whether the following onscreen exchange actually happened in real life, but it pretty much says it all: “Am I losing you to another man?” “You’re losing me to a life of my own.”
There’s nothing wrong with Priscilla; the acting’s fine, the production values are pretty good, and – the odd minor musical anachronism aside – so is the sense of time and place. But nor is there anything especially notable or memorable about it. The irresolvable conundrum here is that the overall feeling is one of flatness – but that this is no indictment of the film, given that Priscilla Presley’s life in her ‘golden cage’ WAS flat, and terribly sad.
