Priscilla is one of Sofia Coppola’s “moments movies” — stories told not necessarily via plot, but via the textures, sounds, and accessories that combine to create an indelible 30 seconds or so, seconds which say as much about a character and their experience as endless pages of dialogue could.
In this case, the character is Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny), whom we meet in 1959 as a 14-year-old in Frankfurt Germany, where her family lives on a United States military base. Also briefly stationed there is Elvis Presely (Jacob Elordi), who becomes obsessed with Priscilla when they’re introduced. Thus begins a woozy, troubled, troubling romance that would last some 14 years, encompassing a marriage, a child, and eventual divorce in 1973.
Sitting somewhere between a chronological, explanatory biopic like Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis and an avant-garde memory piece like this year’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Priscilla compares most comfortably to Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Both feature young women thrust, not entirely unwillingly, into lives of plush imprisonment. There are perks to their luxuriously padded cells—the first shot of Priscilla is of her bare feet stepping softly across the lush shag carpeting of Graceland—yet the power imbalance is way off. Both Priscilla and Marie grab power where they can.
As in Marie Antoinette (as well as The Virgin Suicides, Somewhere, and The Bling Ring), Coppola captures this all in fleeting moments: the barely teen Priscilla floating down the hallway of her school the day after she and Elvis have shared a kiss; his release of her into the ubiquitous crowd of screaming girls on the tarmac when he returns to the States, sending her back into anonymous fandom; the hiss and mist of the Aqua Net spray that allows her Graceland hairdo to sustain impossible proportions, a spray that enhances her beauty but also freezes her in her place; Priscilla sitting alone on a vast white couch at Graceland, the home quiet and empty, like a tomb, whenever Elvis is out of town. This is sensory cinema of a particularly perceptive kind, at once immersed in the immediacy of a moment and offering an ambivalence about the moment’s wider implications.
Music has always been a crucial tool for Coppola, and that is especially the case here. In another nod to Marie Antoinette, the film includes dreamy, ethereal, anachronistic compositions from the likes of Porches, Dan Deacon, and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Being denied the rights to Elvis’ music, meanwhile, turns out to be a blessing in disguise; it’s an absence that helps shift that power dynamic, while also allowing Coppola to counter with women artists from the period such as Brenda Lee and Anita Kerr. There is also a brilliant needle “not drop” involving Tommy James & The Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover,” which plays over a montage of early flirtation. Just as we’re about to hear the song’s famous, climactic chord—the moment of climax, if you will—the music is cut short, denying us satisfaction and hinting at the sudden, harsh way this supposed fairy tale will end.
In the title role, Spaeny more than meets the challenge that a Coppola “moments movie” presents: how to give life to a seemingly passive character, one who gets plenty of camera time but little dialogue. In the widening and narrowing of her eyes, the fullness or falseness of her smile, and the way she sits—comfortably or not—in these immaculately designed spaces, Spaeny embodies a woman in full, one who was essentially groomed to be a mail-order, stay-at-home bride, preferably from the virgin department. (Her own desires are deemed inconsequential.) Priscilla charts her slow realization that she is just another one of Graceland’s accessories, a pretty knickknack.
As Elvis, Jacob Elordi delivers something that is the polar opposite—if equally effective—from Austin Butler’s hip-tastic take on the pop icon in Luhrmann’s film. Where Butler channeled performative energy, Elordi foregrounds Elvis’ demure insecurity. Already balancing uppers and downers when he meets Priscilla, this Elvis is nervous and jittery—quiet, really, at least until there is a scary burst of anger, of which Priscilla is often the target. (When Elvis does come home with his band of buddies, notice how violence surrounds Priscilla, from their games crashing golf carts to the omnipresent guns shoved into the front of their pants.)
How much of this is accurate to actual history? It’s worth noting the movie is adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, and that Presley is credited as an executive producer. Yet Priscilla never feels like one of those safe, self-congratulatory biopics that seems to operate under the shadow of the subject’s approval. Whatever the authenticity of the details, you leave Priscilla convinced that this must have been what being Priscilla Presley felt like, in the moment.
(11/8/2023)
