PRISCILLA (2023): Sofia Coppola Is At The Top of Her Game

Introduction

Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is a loving adaptation of a strange story. Based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, the film is an empathetic treatment of its source material. It also successfully captures Presley’s account of her fifteen-year relationship with Elvis Presley down to each idiosyncratic detail. Captivating, mature, and surprisingly grounded, Priscilla represents the best of both Coppola’s signature style as well as her talent for provoking unease in the viewer.

It’s no mystery why Coppola, a director and writer whose films together create a kind of taxonomy of female loneliness, would be drawn to the story of Priscilla Presley. Presley is an iconic cipher, as instantly recognizable as she is unknowable. Furthermore, her improbable journey from fourteen-year-old schoolgirl to the wife of the most famous man of her time is perfect fodder for Coppola. Her unique talent for contrasting decadent visuals with themes of claustrophobia and repression seems to be in full force here.

Coppola has drawn connections between Presley and her previous subjects. The director compared her to Marie Antoinette in her September 2022  announcement for the film. Both are stories about young women growing up in – to borrow Coppola’s phrasing – “amplified worlds.” Glamorous, highly specific environments ruled over by powerful, unpredictable men. Both are stories about aesthetics. The way that voiceless women can locate expression within the realm of fashion and personal styling. Yet, Priscilla is a much quieter film than the psychedelic epic that is Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). In many ways, it’s also more difficult to swallow. 

Synopsis

Priscilla opens with introductory close-ups of expected details: The application of heavy-winged eyeliner. A brush running through teased black hair. Bare feet sinking into a plush pink carpet. There is a gut-level delight here and a pleasurable rush of familiarity and anticipation when Priscilla, whose face we cannot yet see, picks up a can of Aqua Net and douses herself in it. Coppola is a master of conjuring sensory experiences. As such, the bubblegum prettiness of this opening montage is merely a tease of what’s to come.

At this early stage in the film, however, Coppola refuses to show us the finished product of Priscilla’s ministrations. Instead, we are first taken back in time, to a soda shop in West Germany in 1959. There are disconcerting transitions from pink warmth to cool grays and blues. When we first meet Priscilla (played impeccably by newcomer Cailee Spaeny, who won Best Actress when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival), she’s fresh-faced, full-skirted, and unbelievably and uncomfortably young. 

Perhaps the most difficult task faced by Coppola in making this film was surmounting, or at least subduing, the ick factor. Although films more interested in evoking sympathy for Elvis have certainly tried (most recently Baz Luhrmann’s chaotic, cartoonish biopic Elvis), there is no writing around the fact that Priscilla Beaulieu met Elvis Presley when she was fourteen and he was twenty-four. Indeed, even the most cursory examination of the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis reveals that their difference in ages was perhaps the most important factor in establishing their unique dynamic.

Analysis

Coppola is interested in telling a coming-of-age story and Priscilla’s adolescence is not incidental. It’s central. Her character is composed of all the instability of youth. With her parents, she is alternately wheedling and forceful. With grown men she is tremulously confident, unsteadily wielding the new power of her beauty. Spaeny is particularly charming in these early scenes of teenage desperation. This seems to be Coppola’s solution to the problem presented by Elvis’s somewhat predatory attention. At least at first, we want Priscilla to get what she wants, and what she wants is him.

The book Elvis and Me is often more revealing about the content of Elvis’s character than it is informative about the kind of person Priscilla is now or was throughout their time together. Presley’s own descriptions of her husband are tender and often humorous. They’re also frequently (if unintentionally) distressing for their depictions of emotional manipulation and occasional physical violence.

Priscilla is less concerned with presenting Elvis in a sympathetic light. However, it’s worth noting that Presley, who has been, perhaps, the staunchest defender of Elvis’s legacy since his death in 1977, served as executive producer on the film. Still, it is not a straightforward indictment, either. Coppola’s script emphasizes the power differential between spouses. Yet, it retains much of the humor of Priscilla’s written account, a difficult but ultimately successful endeavor.

Part of this is owed to the casting of Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Elvis. Elordi, who is 6’5”, reads onscreen as practically three times the size of the petite Spaeny. This is a visual distinction that Coppola can use to make Elvis seem protective, enveloping, or threatening depending on the context. In wider shots, we see Elordi crunched into too-small armchairs or slouching through crowds. At times, he appears to be struggling to fit into the contained world of the film. Literally larger than life. It’s a point well taken, despite its obviousness.

Aesthetics

For his part, Elordi plays the legendary musician as sensitive, immature, and even babyish in his lack of control over his emotions. He seems somewhat stunted because, for the majority of the film, he is. Elvis is professionally cowed, and already deep into dependency on prescription drugs. What little power Elvis has, he wields over young Priscilla. Dictating the style of her hair and makeup and the fit and color of her clothes. Bestowing or withholding physical affection as a form of reward or punishment. 

Aesthetics are important to Coppola as a filmmaker. But they are absolutely crucial to the telling of this story. The more enmeshed Priscilla becomes in Elvis’s world, the more she comes to embody the image of her that audiences recognize. That of a 1960s ideal of extreme, almost camp femininity. All big hair and eyeliner and figure-hugging dresses in a pastel rainbow. Further, the functionality of Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship – or, perhaps more accurately, the degree of Priscilla’s acquiescence – is expressed through her adherence to his aesthetic rules.

In many scenes, Priscilla is shown drifting through Graceland alone while Elvis is away. Even in her solitude, she’s dressed to impress in tight clothes and high heels that sink visibly into the carpet, as if signaling the quicksand-like nature of the place. Similarly, the evolution of Priscilla’s style near the end of the 1960s is also a signal that she’s developing more independence. In the film, the birth of her daughter Lisa Marie represents a kind of turning point for Priscilla, as does her mounting suspicion about Elvis’s on-set infidelities. It’s not until we see her with toned-down makeup and loose, light brown waves that the audience understands the full extent of her dissociation from Elvis. 

Critique

Unfortunately, as Priscilla frees herself from Elvis’s all-consuming influence, the film seems to become unmoored. After nearly an hour spent almost entirely within the walls of Graceland, it’s disorienting to suddenly lose sense of time and place. Meticulous attention is paid to the couple’s intimacy, including several beautifully acted scenes of aborted conflict such as when Priscilla overzealously hits Elvis with a pillow during a flirtatious fight and he reacts with startling violence and even more startling remorse. As such, it’s frustrating to zoom back out.

Near the end of the film, one can’t help but feel that their access to Priscilla’s thoughts and feelings has been revoked. Perhaps the adult Priscilla has learned to build defenses that the teenage Priscilla never could, even against the audience. Perhaps, too, Coppola was constrained by her source material, which also falters when it comes to the eventual dissolution of the Presley marriage. Divorce, after all, is a rather banal ending to this story. Nevertheless, the divorce, or at least its immediate prelude, is the ending that Coppola chooses for her film.

The final scenes are scored by Dolly Parton singing “I Will Always Love You” which was a song that Elvis supposedly sang to Priscilla in private during their divorce proceedings. They show Priscilla’s respectful departure from Graceland. One of the final moments is the opening of the famous gates, which, for most of the film, represents Elvis’s re-entrances into Priscilla’s life. Now, finally, they are allowing an exit. It is a bittersweet image, but irrepressibly hopeful. We might not know quite who Priscilla is without Elvis, but she seems to, and maybe that’s enough. 

Conclusion

The ending seems to be an emotional inverse of the ending of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. That film also concludes with its heroine in motion, bidding farewell to her adopted home. Then rolling credits before we can see what happens next. We all know how Marie Antoinette’s story ended, and so the final emotional beat of the film is dread. Coppola doesn’t have to show us the guillotine. She relies on our own built-up affection for her character to evoke discomfort with the story’s conclusion.

The final beat of Priscilla, on the other hand, is something like relief. We may not be sure where she’s going (Los Angeles, probably?). But we care about her enough at this point to hope that she is driving towards her own future. On second thought, maybe these endings aren’t so different, at least not for some viewers.

After all, those of us who know anything about Priscilla Presley’s career over the last few decades are aware that neither their divorce nor his premature death four years later represented the end of their relationship. “I’d never planned on a future without Elvis,” she writes in Elvis and Me. Coppola can have Priscilla drive away, and linger on a moment of hard-won liberation.

Coppola is a canny, restrained filmmaker. She doesn’t have to show us what we already know, which is this forty-six years after his death, the real Priscilla still appears yearly to lead tours of Graceland during Elvis Week. She produces films and television shows about her ex-husband’s life and has overseen the dedication of an official Elvis postage stamp and the creation of new compilation albums like If I Can Dream: Elvis Presley with the Royal Philharmonic. Priscilla never planned on a future without Elvis, and, it seems, she never got one. 

Priscilla premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4, 2023. A24 released the film in the United States in limited theaters on October 27.

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