Priscilla movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

Sofia Coppola is a private filmmaker whose work follows a thematic by way of line: her photos are all, in a technique or one other, about captivity and isolation. For the characters held captive the cage is commonly a gilded one, and the cage looking for a chook (in Kafka’s phrase) in “Priscilla” is Elvis Presley.

The King famously met Priscilla Beaulieu in 1959 when he was within the U.S. Military, stationed in Germany; Priscilla was the daughter of one other officer stationed there and was, properly, 14 on the time the 2 had been launched. Coppola’s film, written by the director and primarily based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, honors the writer by giving us her perspective. And whereas latter-day concerns of Presley’s habits in courting, or one would possibly say capturing, Priscilla are replete with condemnations of how creepy it was—the phrase “groomer” is tossed round, and in some particular methods seen right here, it’s completely apt—from the standpoint of a dreamy, distracted Austin Texas lady removed from dwelling the eye of this very shy famous person is exhilarating.

In clearly tight collaboration with cinematographer Philipe Le Sourd (who shot Coppola’s “The Beguiled”) and editor Sarah Flack (who has been with Coppola because the nice “Marie Antoinette”; I’m obliged right here additionally to reveal that Sarah is a buddy), Coppola provides us a world of lovely and surprisingly nonetheless surfaces. In her room in a modest home in Germany, Priscilla reads fan magazines; as soon as out in Graceland and instructed to not be seen on the garden an excessive amount of, she reclines in residing rooms and dens that obtained a lot tackier after she divorced Presley in early 1973. Numerous the occasions Priscilla simply doesn’t know what to do with herself. As her famous person husband has his movie profession mismanaged by a never-seen-Colonel Tom Parker (did Sofia Coppola see Hanks in “Elvis” and say, “There’s simply no topping Tom Hanks, I shouldn’t even attempt?” Really, I don’t suppose that’s it), he’ll go away Memphis for Los Angeles and inform his bride to “preserve the house fires burning.”

What’s Priscilla there for, anyway? Particularly since, having organized to separate her from her household and be roughly one thing like her guardian, he firmly refuses to sleep along with her regardless of her rising requests for intimacy. After they first meet in Germany, Elvis, fully honest and earnest, tells the ninth-grader (and he right here is shocked to be advised that she’s that younger) that he’s lonesome for a woman to speak to. His mother had simply handed away. All of it appears so harmless.

Of their early relationship, they’re each naïfs. Elvis has a poster of “On The Waterfront” in his bed room, and he tells Priscilla that when he returns to the States, he needs to check on the Actor’s Studio to emulate Marlon Brando and James Dean. He takes her to see “Beat the Satan,” and Priscilla is amused and awed that her buddy is aware of all of Bogart’s strains within the film by coronary heart. He goals of an expansive creative life. She goals simply of being with him. Of the 2, just one may have their goals come true. After which the dream received’t be sufficient.

This cool, unhurried film is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated efficiency by Caillee Spaeney. The 25-year-old performs 14 so rattling properly that the viewer nearly doubts that she’ll be capable to credibly age into a girl nearing 30. However she does, superbly. As Elvis, Jacob Elordi towers over her; the distinction is an exaggeration from real-life however an efficient one. This Elvis is soft-spoken, given to discomfiting bursts of anger as he involves rely increasingly more on medicines to spice up power and get to sleep; all of the stuff that killed the person, in the long run, is right here in ostensibly extra manageable kind, however Coppola’s storytelling does convey its insidious creep. The film enjoys moving into a few of Presley’s early ‘60s idiosyncrasies; he goes by way of a Bible-study section, reads the Autobiography of a Yogi, and even experiments with LSD with Priscilla. Coppola’s transient depiction of their journey is without doubt one of the extra credible accounts of psychedelic expertise in latest movie. And all this time, even by way of movie-set affairs rumored and/or actual, he retains Priscilla chaste till after marriage. After which knocks her up instantly.