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The starkest difference among many between Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is their proximity to reality. Hyperactively hagiographic Elvis is happiest reinforcing a popular image. Quieter Priscilla feels far closer to an approximation of things as they probably were. Though not a very talkative movie, Priscilla’s release more than a year after the Luhrmann film lends it the extra gravity the final word can give an argument — additional power to a perspective that has for decades been appreciated in broader culture as mostly ornamental.

That perspective: that of Priscilla Beaulieu, 14 years old when in 1959 she met a 24-year-old Elvis Presley, then still amid a two-year military stint, at the home where he was renting and hosting a party in Germany. (The stepdaughter of an Air Force officer, Priscilla’s family moved around a lot.) From that party onward sprung a courtship, which today would be more accurately characterized as grooming, that would continue rockily and without consummation until the start of an even rockier marriage in 1967 that lasted until 1973. Elvis is played by Jacob Elordi; Priscilla is played in the movie by a revelatory Cailee Spaeny, who believably ages from a saucer-eyed teenager who many people openly remark is a little young for Elvis to a 28-year-old woman realizing she wants to be more than someone’s wife. 

Read the full review on South Sound.