Priscilla (2023)

***½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Dominiczyk
based on the book Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola takes a lot of heat for making movies about what she knows. This strikes me as peculiar, because I don’t really have any desire to see a Sofia Coppola film about, say, enslaved African peoples. But one about a rich little girl lost? Yes, please. It seems, in fact, that what Coppola is doing as an author is the kind of thing generally celebrated with auteur theories and canonization. I wonder why she’s been popularly singled out as a creator who’s failed to checklist minority groups outside her own. What would the reception of her remarkable remake of The Beguiled have been like had she foregrounded the enslaved African American character and attempted to write her through the lens of Sofia Coppola’s experience? Was her eliding of the character seen as whitewashing, was that the problem? How was the character treated in Don Siegel’s version? How do the Oscar-winning depictions of enslaved African Americans in Gone with the Wind fare? I wonder if the cries for Coppola to have more diversity in her films is a disingenuous complaint driven primarily by a general dislike of Coppola because she’s some combination of a woman and a nepo-baby who doesn’t seem the least bit interested in catering to a larger audience. I wonder why Jean Renoir didn’t get crucified for the same thing. Honestly, I don’t wonder.

Priscilla is her eighth portrait of loneliness, and it’s as dulcet and lovelorn as the first seven, though spiced with a pinch of statutory discomfort she handles as taboo, illicit, and of course magical because of it. I don’t think Coppola is condoning it. I think she’s depicting it with absolute honesty. When we meet Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), she is 14 going on eternity, living on the United States Air Force Base in Germany and receiving a personal invitation to a party at the nearby home of 24-year-old Pvt. Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). What she finds is a good ol’ Memphis boy, surrounded by hangers-on, who tells starstruck, moony Priscilla he misses talking to girls from “back home” before breaking into an impromptu performance of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” on an upright piano. The best-known version of this Curlee Williams standard is Jerry Lee Lewis’s, of course, and Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the worst human beings ever to stalk the rockabilly charts, married his third cousin Myra Gale when she was 13 and “The Killer” was 22. The same age gap, give or take, separating Priscilla and her suitor, as well as the first of many references Coppola will make to the essential irresolvability of the King’s interest in the girl who would soon become his child bride.

I love how, one night after Elvis has returned to Tennessee and sent the now-17-year-old Priscilla a first-class ticket to join him, Priscilla overhears her parents arguing in the next room. They’re upset, naturally, but know that forbidding her from going would only lead to them losing her as soon as she’s considered an adult. My wife and I have balanced the discipline of our children against the same metric: Is the hill we’re willing to die on potentially one that will estrange us from them? I don’t know if this is from Priscilla’s autobiography about her and Elvis (which served as Coppola’s primary source material), but it sounds like something parents might discuss when their kids are on the verge of leaving their legal control. Priscilla departs for Tennessee, and that night tries to seduce Elvis, who tells her he needs to be in charge of when the time is right for them to consummate their relationship. The real Priscilla has often made note of how Elvis didn’t ravage her sexually until after she turned 18, in response to questions about the appropriateness of their relationship, so this tracks. It doesn’t, however, answer the question of whether or not the most famous person on the planet has an impossible advantage over a child, one that he used to manipulate and control her for years until she walked away.

Priscilla lives in the ambiguity of that power dynamic. Elvis is mercurial and childish: charming and hyper-focused on her one second, violent and petulant the next. Every few weeks, he tells her it’s not going to work out and she should leave, until finally, she gets up and goes, his voice chasing her down the hall, begging her to come back. He tells her she’s imagining all the proof of his manifold infidelities and warns that what he needs is a “good girl” who doesn’t ask so many questions and waits for him at the giant home he bought for his now-dead mother. She visits him in Vegas, a week of gambling and drinking, and he sends her away when Ann-Margret calls. He’s not a bad guy, merely a child: Anthony Fremont in that episode of “The Twilight Zone” where everyone does what Anthony wants or they’re sent to the cornfield. He doesn’t lack morality, he just stopped developing his at the point at which everyone started doing everything he wanted and he could no longer do any wrong. But Priscilla grows up, and Coppola watches her carefully for signs she’s getting older than her beau: when she raises her voice in defense of herself for the first time; when she notices how her daughter, Lisa Marie (Raine Monroe Boland and Emily Mitchell), runs to her nanny but only trudges, reluctantly at that, to her daddy.

Priscilla is a Sofia Coppola joint; if it’s predictable, at least it’s predictably great. Still, I think the story Coppola wants to and perhaps should tell is embedded in that relationship between Elvis and Lisa Marie, or Priscilla and her father (Ari Cohen). Fathers and daughters is her defining trope, her object of obsession and idée fixe. My favourite film of hers remains Somewhere, about an actor (Stephen Dorff) convalescing at the Chateau Marmont with his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), whose mother has had a nervous breakdown. She helps him grow up. Coppola is not unlike Ozu in this way, telling the story of our lives through the story of how children become parents to their parents, who long for their kids to be children again. She is perhaps not the perfect choice, after all, for a once-proposed live-action Little Mermaid, which is, at its essence, a cautionary tale about the dangers of a young woman not listening to her father. Priscilla‘s period details in set design and costume are ridiculously granular–when Priscilla walks barefoot through Graceland’s thick pile rugs, you can feel the coarse yarn squeezing up between your toes–and its central performance from Spaeny is as heartbreaking and vulnerable as it is eventually steely and actualized. This Priscilla raises herself. Fatherless (friendless, really), she’s left with ample time and motive to consider the gulf between why a teenage girl becomes obsessed with a rock star and why grown women, for the most part, do not. She figures out that everything important has nothing to do with wealth and fame. It’s wisdom bought as a consequence of her extraordinary privilege–a woman drowned in opulence and notoriety for no other reason than that she caught the “right” eye at the right moment, finding herself unfulfilled and isolated for all that good fortune.