'Priscilla' Review: Sofia Coppola's Inert but Sensitive Biopic Offers a Much-Needed Antidote to 'Elvis' – IndieWire
Priscilla Presley solely had a couple of treasured traces in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” (a delirious biopic whose title all the time feels prefer it’s lacking an exclamation level), and even fewer of them have been memorable within the slightest. However, somewhat greater than a 12 months since that film got here out, one little bit of Priscilla’s dialogue continues to stick with me for the way succinctly it crystallized the movie’s conception of her. “I’m your spouse!” She yells at Elvis, as if he doesn’t know. “I AM YOUR WIFE!” That was all she was in that story. It was no totally different than if Vernon Presley had screamed “I AM YOUR DAD!” or if Colonel Tom Parker had bellowed “I AM YOUR MANAGER!” (which he in all probability did).
And that’s tremendous, I suppose — “Elvis” had its personal agenda, and its namesake’s solely spouse didn’t play a big half in it. However Luhrmann’s spasmodic rhinestone spectacle might have lastly served its objective, because it now offers useful context for a brand new movie that one other main artist has made about The King’s one-time queen. Which isn’t to counsel that Sofia Coppola’s tender and muted “Priscilla” must be seen as some sort of rebuttal to final summer season’s orgiastic blockbuster, however relatively to reaffirm her determination to border this claustrophobic marriage story as a gradual technique of separation. Not simply Priscilla’s separation from Elvis and the limitless shadow of his superstar, but in addition her separation from her mother and father, from her personal iconography, and from everybody and every part else that attempted to outline her earlier than she was in a position to outline herself.
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After all, Coppola was by no means going to method this story in every other means. Lengthy compelled by the unfavourable area between younger girls and the worlds they inhabit (a niche that “The Virgin Suicides” described as “an oddly formed vacancy mapped by what surrounded them, like nations we couldn’t title”), Coppola has made a profession out of releasing privileged women from gilded cages; women who’re determined to flee the sense that they’re merely disguised as themselves, all the time watched however seldom seen. From “Misplaced in Translation” to “Marie Antoinette,” her movies have typically framed marriage because the purgatorial first step in a heroine’s path in direction of precise personhood. Her newest function makes it unattainable to shake the sensation that Sofia Coppola would in all probability have been moved to invent Priscilla Presley if Priscilla Presley hadn’t finally discovered a approach to invent herself.
Comparisons to the extra opulent and electrifying “Marie Antoinette” are inevitable, as each motion pictures are about teenage women who’re making an attempt to appease their kings, and each motion pictures have a look at their hermetically sealed historic figures by way of a (considerably) trendy lens that sees by way of a long time or centuries of mythmaking in an effort to render the emotional actuality of their respective conditions. However from a sure perspective, “Priscilla” can be the polar reverse of Coppola’s 2006 masterpiece. Whereas Marie Antoinette was compelled to Versailles in opposition to her will, Priscilla Presley’s final dream was — like many ladies her age in 1963 — to stay in Graceland as Elvis’ spouse. And whereas Marie Antoinette spent the brunt of her quick life struggling to reconcile a way of private identification with the one conferred upon her by the royal palace, Priscilla Presley, who’s nonetheless alive as we speak (and an government producer on this movie), spent the brunt of her quick marriage realizing that she didn’t need to.
“Priscilla” might not be one of many higher motion pictures that Coppola has ever made — it’s obscure the place her earlier coming-of-age tales have been knowingly exact, scattered the place its predecessors revealed new perception with every scene, and gloomy the place these different movies have been galvanized with pockets of sunshine — but it surely stands aside from the remainder of her work because the uniquely delicate and self-honest portrait of a lady who begins to understand that she might have outgrown her best fantasy.
One in every of Coppola’s signature pre-title sequences however, the film first introduces us to Priscilla within the fall of 1959, when she’s residing along with her mother and father on an Air Pressure base in West Germany. Performed by a candy and recessive Cailee Spaeny, the Priscilla we meet is 14 happening 12 — a mousy younger army brat whose father would in all probability kill any man who dared present her the slightest trace of sexual consideration. However 24-year-old Elvis Presley, stationed in Unhealthy Nauheim on the top of his fame, isn’t simply any man.
Performed by “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi, whose instantly convincing tackle the character is extra human and heartsick than Austin Butler’s efficiency ever was (much less a dig than a job description), Elvis sparks to the underage Priscilla at a crowded home celebration as a result of she reminds him of residence. That loaded come-on proves typical of a movie that shrewdly hears all of its dialogue in stereo, by way of Priscilla’s ears on one finish and our personal on the different (Coppola’s dialogue-light script relies on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me”).
“You’re such a child,” Elvis coos approvingly at his underage new crush, not teasing her a lot as fetishizing her innocence. Grieving his late mother 3,000 miles from Graceland, this Elvis appears bored with being one of many planet’s greatest intercourse symbols, and that he’s already dropping contact with any of the actual issues on this world. We sense that he sees the button-nosed Priscilla as a tether of types, one that may maintain him from being subsumed into the siren’s track of his personal picture. She’s all too glad to oblige.
Coppola is as sharply attuned to the variations in age and energy between these two individuals as any filmmaker ever has or could possibly be, and whereas Elordi’s towering top may be as unrealistic as any of the subtly anachronistic needle-drops that litter the film (The Ramones’ “Child I Love You” and Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” being two apparent standouts), the movie takes full benefit of how small Priscilla all the time appears beside him. Elvis looms so massive that his baby bride will have the ability to really feel his shadow being forged over Graceland even when her husband is off in Hollywood sleeping with varied starlets and making an attempt to develop into the subsequent Marlon Brando.
However Coppola isn’t in a rush to get to that half. She delights within the early years after Elvis and Priscilla’s whirlwind romance — after he went again to his throngs of screaming fangirls within the States and Priscilla was given the unattainable activity of going again to her life as an odd excessive schooler. It’s like Cinderella being compelled to brush the attic once more after her magical evening on the ball, and listening to all about her prince’s amorous affairs each time she activates the radio. However this Cinderella’s prince is the King, and regardless of ample alternatives to use his loyal topics he by no means forgets concerning the lady he met in Germany.
When the decision lastly comes for Priscilla to affix her man in Memphis, she thinks she’s being summoned again right into a fairy story, when in actuality she’s successfully being adopted as a housecat — a dynamic he tries to decrease by giving Priscilla a canine. Coppola isn’t shy about how Elvis begins to groom his girlfriend (a lately loaded phrase that may’t be averted right here), however she’s by no means painted any of her characters as a sufferer and he or she isn’t about to begin now.
Priscilla’s first years at Graceland are all a part of changing into the fantasy, a course of that entails being remodeled into Elvis’ excellent girl at the same time as she’s hidden away from the general public eye with the assistance of his omnipresent posse of pistol-packing goons. Priscilla will get the massive hair, packs away all of her good prints, and clothes herself in varied shades of blue as a result of Elvis insists that it’s her shade (the very first shot of the film, which involves assume an undertone of rebel in hindsight, would counsel that Priscilla disagrees).
Within the eyes of a filmmaker who’s all the time used exterior aesthetics to entry the inside lives of people that aren’t permitted to have them, Priscilla’s makeover is a violently oppressive negation of her selfhood, and it doesn’t cease along with her model. Elvis will get her hooked on the identical uppers and downers that he makes use of to keep up the rhythm of his life; he later presents Priscilla an costly watch, oblivious to how ineffective it may be within the purgatory he’s created for her.
It goes with out saying that Elvis doesn’t come off so nice on this film, however “Priscilla” by no means renders him as a monster, even after he begins throwing chairs and entering into scandals. Quite the opposite, the movie paints him as a (very flawed) actual one that’s equally entombed by the picture that’s been created for him. Elordi and Spaeny don’t spend a ton of display screen time collectively — Elvis doesn’t even contact Priscilla till they get married, regardless of her pleading — however they have a look at one another with mutual sympathy when given the possibility. It’s the mutual sympathy of two individuals compelled to navigate larger-than-life roles as two individuals compelled to navigate larger-than-life roles.
And whereas the fragmented nature of Coppola’s movie makes it frustratingly tough to chart how Elvis and Priscilla start to vary (way more elliptical than “Marie Antoinette” and even “Someplace,” this herky-jerky film is structured with the elusiveness of a reminiscence play), that frustration could be offset by the sense that neither of them actually change that a lot. Coppola’s cloistered imaginative and prescient of Graceland, which appears a lot smaller on digital camera than it’s in actual life, provides to a pervasively inert sense of stasis.
Surrounded by a pink fieldstone wall, the home is a sanctuary that’s separate from the world — the attention of an unmoving hurricane that’s all the time watching her. An occasional on-screen title updates us on the 12 months, however the one actual approach to measure the passage of time is by watching the decor wilt into kitsch. That Elvis’ property denied Coppola the rights to most of his music works to the benefit of a film so keyed into how eliminated Priscilla felt from something that was occurring in her husband’s profession.
Equally, that Spaeny by no means appears to age over the 14-year span of the story solely reaffirms the atemporality of Priscilla’s existence, as does the blankness of her efficiency and the repetitiveness of Coppola’s screenplay, which denies character and actress alike with any significantly dramatic alternatives to depict private progress. “Marie Antoinette” looks like a broad melodrama in comparison with impressionistic minimalism on show right here.
There are a handful of uniquely expressive moments when Coppola performs to her strengths, such because the late scene during which Priscilla applies her eyeliner with the righteous objective of a girl creating her personal picture, but it surely’s in any other case laborious to trace how Priscilla finds herself. We all know that she’ll finally braid a ladder that she makes use of to climb over the fortress partitions and escape by way of the cracks of the fairy story she’s been telling to herself since she was a tween, however in follow it simply appears like she reaches the top of her rope when Coppola runs out of story to inform.
All the identical, the film saves its richest nuance for its closing photographs, that are set to a music cue that’s fascinatingly unambiguous about Elvis and Priscilla’s enduring affection for each other. Priscilla might outgrow her teenage fantasy, however that doesn’t imply she involves hate the person who made all of her desires come true. Fantasies aren’t actual, but it surely’s higher to allow them to die than to deprive ourselves from having them within the first place. Whereas “Priscilla” leaves it open-ended as to the place its namesake would possibly go from right here (the movie, alas, ends about 20 years too early for us to see Coppola re-create the set of “The Bare Gun 2 ½: The Scent of Concern”), it’s sufficient to know that she’ll by no means need to say “I’M YOUR WIFE!” once more.
Grade: B
“Priscilla” premiered on the 2023 Venice Movie Pageant. A24 will launch it in theaters on Friday, October 27.
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