If David Lynch makes movies about “women in trouble,” Sofia Coppola makes movies about women imprisoned. And, writing that, I now wish I could see her version of an actual women-in-prison film like The Big Bird Cage. However, the point still stands: Her filmography is about the gilded panopticon of expectation and desire and whether or not one can escape it or even wants to. Add a brush of early would-be superstardom (and its long-felt consequences) and her genetic predisposition to some level of public awareness regarding her very existence. You get the beating heart of her films: Empathy for the bright young woman who is an object claimed by circumstance and desire, trapped in a maze that seems to have no end and whose paths are constantly changed by the men who created it. With the exceptions of The Virgin Suicides and, more importantly, Marie Antoinette, which was frankly one of the ballsiest anti-populist yet hypermodern depictions of the flippancy and isolation of royalty, her contemporary work has often been her best — Lost in Translation, Somewhere, The Bling Ring – where she confronts the modern absurdities of young womanhood, informed by the trade-off she perceives between emotion and liberation at its core. Yet she’s struggled over her last few films to find her footing: The Beguiled was aesthetically delightful yet vacuous, and On the Rocks strived for a kind of mainstream recognition that, while reuniting her with Bill Murray for one more pleasant outing, didn’t suit her talents as well as it could have, perhaps because it felt old.
One might think that a project like Priscilla would be an easy slam-dunk for Coppola, given that the subject – the Presley courtship, marriage, and its eventual collapse – contains all the ingredients needed for her to make a masterpiece. It’s set in a period stacked with stylistic iconography and flair, with one of its primary cultural architects adjacent to its central character, and it’s also a tale of yearning giving way to uncomfortable romance and eventual isolation, where the ambiguities of its leads play an important factor in how their relationship is understood. It could have been, for all intents and purposes, a chance to ensure that the dynamics of something like Marie Antoinette would be appropriately grasped by an audience the first time around, especially with the memetics at play when dealing with a studio like A24, who can, through sheer force of marketing will make a ticketholder understand why what they’re getting themselves into is capital A-R-T. But Priscilla is, sadly, the worst-case scenario resulting from such an approach, helped even less by the fact that Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist Elvis biopic beat it to screens by a year, assisted by a deeper understanding of the cultural enigma and his flaws even as it constructed an easy hagiography of him. It’s a weirdly simplistic view of its leads, rendered flatly, that lurches through the motions of its story to a hideously underwhelming conclusion that neglects one of the most important aspects of this tale: its aftermath.
We meet Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) as a poodle-skirted ninth grader studying at the malt shop on a US base in Germany. She’s understandably very shy, having been uprooted from her life in Austin thanks to her dad’s position in the Air Force, with a profoundly dreary malaise emerging from her alienation. When the officer who schedules the entertainment at the base approaches her and tells her she’s invited to a gathering at the house of the one-and-only Elvis Presley (Jacob Elodi), who is doing his mandatory military service at the very same base, it’s like a ray of hope has emerged from the heavens to uplift her. Her parents are understandably suspicious of this, and Coppola uses these early moments to immerse the audience in the discomforting nature of the origin of this relationship. When she meets Elvis, he’s very briefly what she assumed he’d be – cocky, romantic, sexy, older – mumbling his way through his Memphis variation on the Brando accent. She’s clued in quickly to his insecurities: His mom has recently died, and he’s unsure that he’ll be popular or well-received by the public when he heads back home after being out of the spotlight for a number of years. She realizes how much of his image is constructed, watching him quote Bogie in Beat the Devil line-by-line at a screening on one of their dates, and is weirdly endeared by his reluctance to go any further physically than kissing. He makes her feel safe, and he’s well-versed in the rituals of courtship: he asks her parents for permission to take her on dates, adheres to her curfews, and diligently dotes on her.
This ambiguity is the movie’s greatest asset, with Coppola refusing to stake out a viewpoint or let it drift into a diatribe, with the grey silence of a West German winter informing its moodiness, allowing Elvis to exist both as a creep and as the ultimate fulfillment of the fantasies of millions of young women who would have jumped to be in a similar circumstance. There’s any number of interpretations one could make out of those early moments – either this is the story of a great and strange romance, given that Coppola is no stranger to May-December relationships presented in an idealized form, or this is the tale of a girl whose support system utterly failed her while trying to ensure that she had some autonomy. Yet once Priscilla lands in Memphis, two years after she met Elvis, and enters the gates at Graceland, the carefully constructed nature of this relationship and its ambiguities collapses into a near self-parody. It’s front-loaded by design, given that fairy tales tend to have their appeal in the rising action, but one might think that Graceland would allow for Coppola to do more than open her aperture a bit.
What follows is, essentially, a long series of conversations set in a bedroom, with words essentially whispered by Elordi to Spaeny, as these characters Coppola worked so hard to establish in that first act drift into vacuity and outright parody. It’s not particularly difficult to portray Elvis as a buffoon – we have a whole cultural complex constructed around his descent into drug-addled self-parody – but Coppola’s interpretation, with him as a kind of mush-mouthed Kenny Powers (citing his books about Eastern mysticism in the same way that Powers talked about his “Criterions”) that occasionally bursts into abusive rages, is as dull as it is easy.
On the other hand, we’re meant to empathize with that disappointment: Priscilla realizes that the man of her dreams is anything but, with her attraction to him coming from marketing and her escape attempt from her G.I. Brat Blues. Of course, she finds herself in a different kind of prison, but you wouldn’t be able to tell it. If there’s a single image that defines so much of Coppola’s work, it’s a young woman in repose — a juxtaposition of comfort, vulnerability, privilege, and boredom – yet it’s never been as vacant and meaning-deprived as it is here. Perhaps it’s because she does best when she has a genuine firebrand at a given film’s core, an enigmatic and charismatic subject of curiosity, or at least one adjacent to it. But Spaeny and Elordi struggle to play off one another, given the limitations of their roles as Coppola has written and directed them. Those images are given power by their context, and the film is almost devoid of it, demanding that the audience supply a decent chunk of the narrative, perhaps implying that Carpenter’s or Lurhmann’s Elvis films are required prerequisites to enjoy what’s presented here properly.
Yet it suffers in comparison, given how alive and vibrant those movies are compared to the desaturated palette with which she renders these dreary scenes. It’s an impulse that’s easy to understand: Stripping away the Elvis aesthetic from an Elvis-adjacent story allows us to focus on him as a character and, more importantly, Priscilla, but the problem is that Lurhmann beat her to the punch in crafting a movie in which Elvis is the caged party, where his image proves to be a plastic bag wrapped around his head.
Again, it’s not like Coppola hasn’t riffed on that same theme, with Marie Antoinette capturing the glamor and isolation that wealth brings to a loveless marriage, and her making the film gaudy in its own right didn’t negate its emotional or thematic impact. It suffers from the comparison and not simply from the difference in budget: It is soaked in the luxury of its era, whereas Priscilla dabbles in it occasionally. It attempts anachronism – Dan Deacon’s “Crystal Cat” plays over a dreams-come-true montage practically ripped from a modern-day Levi’s commercial – without doing the work that ensured that the post-punk and new wave needle drops in Marie blended wonderfully with the period-appropriate orchestral selections. And most importantly, that film allowed its central character to exist as a person who wasn’t above criticism within the narrative itself: she’s shitty, flippant, and spoiled, yet we come to understand the complexities of her situation and find, through Coppola’s perspective, the depth within her. Priscilla is ultimately a static character, and what we’re left with is an absent presence at the core of the narrative, drifting from room to room in that house, ultimately returning to the bedroom to have some goofy horseshit thrown at her by her philandering and ill-tempered husband. Even when she rises to leave him and embark upon establishing her own life as an independent woman, freed from all the traps, the film plays her off with Dolly’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” and smash-cuts to credits.
For a film about a spouse trying to transcend past the overbearing and overwhelming presence of her husband, it is, ultimately, defined by him to the point that his narrative exit ensures that this will be the final reel. It should have been called Mrs. Presley, because, after that first act, it’s all the film can muster up to say about her.