Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is claustrophobic, taut and fascinating, leaving us with far more questions than it ultimately attempts to answer. Priscilla loved Elvis, but did Elvis ever love anyone?
In a recent Guardian interview with Tim Jonze, Priscilla Presley said, “I just liked that he was paying attention to me. He was very opinionated on what he wanted: ‘I don’t like you in that colour. Brown isn’t good for you. Green looks horrible; it’s a dull colour with no spark to it.’ I was a young kid, 16 years old, so I thought: ‘Oh, OK!’ It wasn’t until I got a little older that I started developing things that I liked.” Elvis met Priscilla in 1959 while stationed at a U.S. Army base in Germany. Priscilla was the daughter of a senior officer and was just 14 when they were first introduced at a party. Now, we would label Elvis’s behaviour as grooming, and Sofia Coppola’s movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me”, doesn’t skirt the issue.
As Elvis becomes a part of Priscilla’s young life, discomfort arises surrounding his actions. Yet he is tender and kind, his actions gentlemanly, as he attempts to build a nonsexual relationship with his schoolgirl princess. That doesn’t mean his motivations are not confused; for Elvis, Priscilla is like an immaculate, untouchable porcelain doll that must be treasured and not spoiled.
As their early nonsexual relationship grows, it quickly becomes apparent that Elvis may be a man, but mentally, he appears trapped in perpetual adolescence. Others have crafted his adult image while the boy was forever locked away inside the husk of the man. Elvis isn’t a monster or abuser; he is a damaged yet privileged man searching for someone he can confide in and communicate with on his level. As he takes Priscilla to see Beat the Devil at the cinema, he discusses the Hollywood career he dreams of building, and Elvis, the man-child king, slowly emerges. He needs Priscilla in his life like a child needs a comforting blanket, and luckily for him, she feels the same, as he invites her to the closed world of Graceland.
Cailee Spaeny’s compelling, intimate and moving performance as Priscilla is one of the year’s best. Spaeny beautifully captures the excitement of Elvis’ early advances, the longing to be close to him despite the age difference, and the eventual disappointment as the life she dreamed of at Graceland becomes a golden cage of loneliness. Here, Elvis attempts to mould her into a publicly acceptable doll he can wheel out when needed, while continuing to have affairs away from home. For all his charm and softly spoken declarations of love, Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is prone to bursts of anger, control issues, and flights of escapism as he consumes uppers and downers like sweets.
If Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler gave us the public image of the “King” in Elvis, then Sofia Coppola and Jacob Elordi offer us the damaged, complicated and fragile boy in man’s clothes in Priscilla. For die-hard Elvis fans, this may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it illuminates the complexity of the man behind the carefully crafted image.
Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is claustrophobic, taut and fascinating, leaving us with far more questions than it ultimately attempts to answer. Priscilla loved Elvis, but did Elvis ever love anyone? In many ways, his entourage of male companions was more of a marriage than his eventual union with the schoolgirl he met in 1959. As Priscilla said, “I lived somebody else’s life. It was never about me; it was really about him on every level.” Coppola’s film captures this reality by lifting the veil of fame and asking us, “Who was Elvis?” It does not seek to destroy him or paint Priscilla as a victim of his uneasy yet tender love. Instead, it asks if any union can survive in the darkness of a fairytale world built on public image and destructive fame.
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