Sofia Coppola's PRISCILLA

A teenage dream or nightmare?

Sofia Coppola is one of my favorite filmmakers, partially because she is so consistent in the themes she explores and is indeed the best one to do it. Her films like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, THE BLING RING, and my personal favorite MARIE ANTOINETTE, take us through the ennui of white womanhood. Her characters can be trapped little birds in gilded cages or girls acting out in defiance of being trapped. Her latest film is PRISCILLA, an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s autobiography Elvis and Me, and it’s a look at the woman behind one of the biggest stars of the 20th century and their rocky marriage.

Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) is a lonely teenage girl living in Germany with her military family. A music event booker picks her out at a diner and invites her to a party where rock star Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) will be in attendance. He takes an immediate interest in her and the two begin dating, with Priscilla eventually moving in with Elvis at Graceland to finish her senior year of high school.

The main hook of this movie is that it shows Priscilla’s side to the Presley marriage, and really highlighting how young she was. It’s implied in the movie that she was invited to this party specifically because she was underage and there are many scenes where Spaeny looks like a total child among adults. This whirlwind romance takes her to Las Vegas, introduces her to pills and partying, and almost derails her high school education. Coppola strikes a fascinating balance between the excitement and the discomfort of this relationship. Some of it looks genuinely thrilling, but the question remains: what’s the cost?

Ultimately, however, PRISCILLA lacks something revelatory about this marriage that wasn’t shown in other takes on this story. Elvis wasn’t the first rock star to groom an underage girl, and he’s certainly not the last. The marriage doesn’t really show us anything more about celebrity, manipulation, or grooming that hasn’t been done before. I mean, this blog is named after a movie in which a man dictates what a woman should wear and how she should do her hair. Elvis doesn’t let her have friends or have much of an opinion. It’s upsetting, but it feels shallow. What’s the take on this marriage, that’s my main question to Coppola.

The obvious comparison is to Coppola’s 2006 film MARIE ANTOINETTE. Like PRISCILLA, the film is about Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) sold off to marriage and living at Versailles as a stranger in a strange land. The palace is like a gossipy high school, and so the queen defies the court with lavish spending, decadence, and general DGAF. Transposing French royal intrigue into high school drama is a definite choice and it provides a window into Marie Antoinette’s relationship to her surroundings. In PRISCILLA, however, I never got a sense of Priscilla’s reckoning with her circumstances or offering any kind of perspective. The scenes of Priscilla waiting alone in a bedroom for Elvis to finish partying or not being allowed to play with her dog are effective but I just needed some extra juice.

Part of the problem is that the last act of the movie is way too rushed. Lisa Marie is born, Elvis and Priscilla grow apart, his drug problem gets worse, and she leaves him. That happens in like the last 15 minutes of the almost 2 hour movie. The methodical first two acts, which feel aimless but intentionally so, don’t really have a payoff even though the finale of the movie is played like one. PRISCILLA almost ends with the idea that Priscilla left him because their relationship wasn’t sustainable with his addiction, his infidelity, and his work. Not because she had some epiphany and found some sense of self that was missing for about a decade. There’s hints of it, but it’s so rushed.

I haven’t read the real Priscilla Presely’s memoir, but I do know that she hasn’t claimed that Elvis was abusive to her, and has said that he was respectful of her age when they first met. And Presley is a producer on the movie, which is why I don’t think the movie goes far in its take on the marriage. I feel like there’s one story Coppola wants to tell, but she is stuck in a limbo with being beholden to the real life Presley. I don’t want to tell Presley what her marriage was like, and I am sure that her relationship to Elvis is complicated even now. But I think some of this is the reason why PRISCILLA feels so half-baked. I trust Coppola and wonder if some of these issues might be ironed out on a second watch. However, as it stands now, PRISCILLA just doesn’t have that same introspective magic.