Priscilla (2023)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Sofia Coppola's films all tend to be about privileged white women struggling for belonging, community, and independence concurrently. She's fascinated by privilege, especially wealth, and often chooses subjects with ambiguous or even corrupt motivations and behaviors. So when I heard a biopic of Priscilla Presley was heading to cinemas, I immediately wondered if Coppola had a hand in it (I also suspected Pablo Larrain, director of Spencer and Jackie). The ex-wife of the King himself, Priscilla is an icon for millions of fans worldwide, the archetypal bird in a gilded cage whose presentational style and photogenic flair has made her a target for criticism and projection by anyone with an opinion since she entered the public scene. After Baz Luhrmann's spectacle-oriented take on Elvis's story last year, it was only a matter of time before someone took on the story of his sometime wife. I'm glad it was Coppola, who feels fresh and earnest as ever.

Coppola's film, which she also adapted from Priscilla's 1985 memoir and produced by Priscilla herself, spends a lot of time putting us in its subject's shoes. A lengthy introductory act situates us in young Priscilla's temporary home in a U.S. military base in Germany in 1959, when she was only fourteen years old. Elvis, who had enlisted, meets her and begins courting her. Coppola leans into how utterly creepy their courtship is, allowing the dialogue, muted colors and light, and pervasive silence to highlight the discomfort of suggestibility. Even as young Priscilla herself is enamored of the star heartthrob, her parents and some others know it's a bit awkward. Contemporary critics would (rightly) label this relationship as "grooming," in no small part due to the number of interactions in which Elvis specifically tells Priscilla how to dress, what to say, and how to feel about both their public and private times together. Jacob Elordi's performance as Elvis is disturbingly effective, and this film almost exclusively shows him in private moments, with reserved energy and a smoldering desperation for control, making his depiction a fascinating contrast to Austin Butler's recent portrayal.

Much as Coppola suggests the eventually tragic flaws that unmade Elvis -- his use of drugs, bursts of rage, and affairs with other women -- she understates it all. She treats Priscilla the same way, and leaves most of the drama in Cailee Spaeny's capable hands. Spaeny has the unenviable task of taking the protagonist from her wide-eyed, starstruck fourteen-year-old youth to her divorce in 1973 at the age of twenty-eight, long after she is established as a fashion icon as well as a mother. Her ability to span this age range is extraordinary, as is her skill at commanding screen presence with precious little dialogue. Much as Coppola works best with facade and internalized beats, Spaeny taps into the woman behind the man to generate a carefully constructed doll-like persona, rich in a growing sense of uncertainty and suspicion that the man she married isn't who he promised to be. The film cleverly -- and in some of its most entertaining moments -- dramatizes Elvis's odd growing phases, including his Bible studies, periodic obsession with autobiographies and philosophical readings, and gunslinging escapades, but focuses on Priscilla's reactions to them and place within (or without) these antics.

Priscilla's facade, expertly crafted by Spaeny and Coppola, is reinforced by the cinematographer and editor, who have both worked with Coppola before, making the whole look and feel of the film less of a biopic and more of a memoir. One hopes that Priscilla's lived experience is honored, especially with the real life woman as executive producer, but the film itself seems to suggest its own authenticity visually and aurally. It also, smartly, avoids some of the more salacious moments it could easily have indulged. We don't see Elvis and Priscilla making love, though a major driving force of the film is sexuality: their courtship, in the first half, must involve some kind of sexual behavior, but Elvis keeps Priscilla virginal until their marriage, after which she immediately becomes pregnant. After, as his affairs become increasingly apparent, Coppola avoids making us see his behaviors, focusing instead on the effect of suspicion and disloyalty on their marriage and on Priscilla in particular.

As in all Coppola films, actually, what we don't see is often as important (if not more important) as what we do see. After Luhrmann's film last summer, I found myself wondering where the elusive and manipulative Colonel Tom Parker was in this movie; he is referenced a few times, but never makes an appearance. One wonders what his relationship with Priscilla looked like, if it existed, but his nebulous, shadowy influence on Elvis is what matters here far more than his direct presence. The relative absence of public scenes and concerts and dramatized sex makes the film feel more trustworthy as biography, and it also makes the scenes in which Elvis attempts to control Priscilla that much more horrifying and vicious. His casual comments that she looks better in blue and that he wants her hair to be black land with a shuddering weight, and in the screening I attended people audibly scoffed at him and muttered phrases like "what the hell" and "girl, no," but there was no laughing. Perhaps most shockingly, in an otherwise standard disagreement, Elvis throws a chair at the wall very near Priscilla, and one audience member called out "bitch, get outta there" and really it was what we were all thinking.

The film's ending, arguably anticlimactic in terms of "action" but deeply satisfying in terms of theme and character, features the most literalized version of Elvis's dream collapsing and Priscilla's life beginning that I could have imagined. For a film about the ways she willingly entered his prison and made the best of it before slowly learning his toxic, abusive truth, that it ends with her liberation -- albeit in a realistically melancholy manner -- Priscilla is one of the most interesting and important movies I've seen yet this year. And I haven't even mentioned the costumes, hair, and makeup.