Priscilla opens with a signature Sofia Coppola montage.  Threaded with the credits are images  of personal items that belong to the eponymous character, as well as close-ups of her applying eyeliner and false eyelashes.  As it turns out, the special event in question is not just a very consequential one in Priscilla Presley’s life, but also one of the few instances where she will have the attention of the media.  When you’re married to The King of Rock & Roll, you have to make the most of what few opportunities have to make a good impression.  The irony of the event and Pricilla’s preparation for it speaks volumes about how dramatically her life had changed in the eight years since she met Elvis.

Coppola then takes us back to the 1950s, when Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) lived in West Germany as a military brat.  It just so happened that the world’s most famous entertainer, Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), was stationed there as well.  In an attempt to keep loneliness at bay, Elvis threw parties at his home for his American friends.  Perhaps thinking that Elvis would appreciate meeting someone younger, one of his military colleagues approached Priscilla at an American-style diner.  One minute she was idly sipping a Coke while doing her homework, the next minute she was invited to a party at Elvis’ house.  Priscilla is understandably in shock, as if she had been asked to fly to the moon.

When Priscilla and Elvis first met, she was fourteen and he was ten years her senior.  That revelation even makes Elvis whistle in amazement.  Things were different back then, but the fact that he was a grown man and she was a freshman in high school is difficult to contextualize in today’s world.  Even still, Priscilla’s parents were not enthused by this development and refused to let her go.  The military man insists that Priscilla would be adequately chaperoned, but everyone knows that never actually happens at parties.  Before long, Priscilla is alone in Elvis’ bedroom.  Speaking softly, Elvis is disarming when he confides that he’s still getting over his mother’s death.  Moments later they share a kiss, and it’s not a peck on the cheek.  Watching a grown man make out with a child is…odd.  Things were different back then.

Elvis shipped out a few months later, and Priscilla had to go back to her previously boring life.  After being in the company of royalty, one doesn’t simply “carry on” afterwards.  When Elvis did reconnect with Priscilla several years later, she jumped at the chance to join him at Graceland.  The deal was for her to complete high school stateside, but goals like graduation were very inconsequential compared to dating the King.  (The movie reveals that she mostly ignored her studies and cheated to graduate.)

Although Priscilla was supposed to be living with Elvis’ father and step-mother, she really spent all of her time at Graceland.  Priscilla was basically his live-in girlfriend, and Coppola’s eye for detail captures exactly what that entailed.  She’s surrounded by finery and is well cared for by the staff, but whenever Elvis leaves to make a movie, her life is incredibly dull.  She’s a teenage girl living in a world of adults and has no friends her age.  When Elvis returns, she plays second fiddle to The Memphis Mafia, Elvis’ inner circle.  It’s only when Priscilla is alone with Elvis that she has his attention.  Well, mostly.  (He has a thing for self-improvement books.)

As a person who isn’t steeped in Elvis lore, several revelations in the movie surprised me.  Even though Priscilla and Elvis were intimate for years, they didn’t have sex until they were married.  They kissed and cuddled and whatnot, but Elvis refused to go any further.  This left Priscilla dumbfounded, because according to the press Elvis was canoodling with the likes of Ann-Margaret and Nancy Sinatra.  (Elvis tells her that the media is making things up, but Priscilla doesn’t believe him.)  Elvis wanted Priscilla to stay a virginal, little girl for as long as possible.  Even though they shared a bed for four years, they never were completely intimate until their wedding night.

Like all biopics, Priscilla provides a standard chronology of the key events in the life of its subject.  Where the movie takes its biggest risk is in its portrayal of Priscilla herself.  Coppola sees her as being largely unchanged from when she met Elvis until just before she divorced him.  She was a quiet, pretty little girl before they met and she remained that way until she decided to end the marriage.  For roughly thirteen years, Priscilla never developed into an adult.  She was basically a kept woman, with her childlike personality trapped in amber.  It wasn’t until she was living outside of the Elvis bubble that Priscilla began to develop her sense of self.  It’s a difficult role to pull off, but Spaeny makes Priscilla’s gradual evolution from naivete to skepticism convincing and sympathetic.

Coppola’s Priscilla certainly is a sobering and often disquieting counterpoint to Baz Huhrrman’s flamboyantly entertaining Elvis.  While the latter characterized Elvis’ life as a wild carnival ride, this one shows what it was like for his wife when he wasn’t around.  Elvis the performer was quite different from Elvis the husband.  He never respected Priscilla as a person and became rageful the few times when she spoke her mind.  (There’s a confrontation that happened while she was pregnant that shocked me.  To her credit, Priscilla handles the moment perfectly.)  

Through her photographer’s eye for detail and setting, Coppola deftly captures how Priscilla’s life was glamorous, occasionally exciting but mostly boring.  Seeing Priscilla wander around Graceland, all dressed up with no place to go, reminded me of a harem girl sequestered by a sultan, or a china doll in a glass case.  While the arrangement was exactly what Elvis wanted, it was a tedious waiting game for Priscilla.  She can’t leave, otherwise she may miss his call or his arrival.  Priscilla’s life was always in stasis until the king returned.

Elordi is pitch perfect, bringing all aspects of Elvis’ personality to life.  That we’ve had two extraordinary characterizations of Elvis put on film within a year of each other is simply incredible.  Whereas Austin Butler epitomized the aspects of the man as a musician and entertainer, Elordi conjures what he was like when not on stage.  Elvis could be shy, silly, gentle, manipulative and rageful.  As Priscilla shows, when he gave you his full attention, it was like the sun was shining only on you.  The sad part of this story is that Elvis rarely gave his attention to Priscilla or daughter, choosing to spend his time on movie sets, touring or in residence at Las Vegas.  Even for Elvis’ wife, life with him was the equivalent of a timeshare.  Enjoy those couple of weeks while you can.

I’ve been an admirer of Coppola’s artistry from her first feature film.  I love how all of her films are imbued with her unique vision and insight, and how she uses her stories to explore different aspects of the themes that interest her.  In Priscilla, Coppola takes another look at the charged dynamic between a young woman and an older man, the curiously dull and isolated lives of the privileged, how we are defined by our environment and our possessions, how recognition and awareness spur personal growth, the evolution of the ingénue into adulthood, how we accept unrewarding relationships and the dangers of living in a bubble.  As with her previous films, Coppola allows her curiosity to guide her vision, crafting a story that yields a fresh perspective on the questions she’s compelled to ask.  The subjects here may be Priscilla and Elvis Presley, but the insight the movie offers is universal.  Recommended.

Analysis

Like a silent film, Priscilla communicates a wealth of information visually.  The movie is probably one of the few that you would be able to watch and understand completely with the sound turned off.  (While Coppola’s previous films also had this quality, it’s much more pronounced in this movie.)  Like her father, Coppola is masterful in the art of showing and not telling, and uses every tool at her disposal to tell this story.  First is her use of what I would call “nature photographer” montages.  Coppola breaks away from the narrative to present a series of images that economically describe the character at a specific moment in time.  She employed this technique several times in Marie Antoinette to effortlessly communicate the opulence of the lifestyle of her leading character and does the same thing in Priscilla.  Regardless of how happy Priscilla is at Graceland, we know that she has everything she could ever ask for, at least when it comes to clothes, makeup and accessories.

Next, Coppola relies on the production design to communicate how much Priscilla’s life changed before and after she met Elvis.  When she was a high school girl living in West Germany, she spent her time after school at a diner, sipping a Coke with a straw at the counter or eating a children’s sundae at a booth.  She writes in a spiral-bound notebook and listens to music emanating from a jukebox.  Her home was a humble one, where she eats meals at a table near the kitchen.  Her bedroom has a twin bed, posters on the wall and is brightly lit.

When Priscilla is transported to Graceland, her physical surroundings change dramatically.  Instead of being relegated to her room, she walks through ornately furnished rooms that are typically vacant when Elvis is out of town.  She sleeps in Elvis’ bedchamber, which has subdued lighting and an ornate, king sized bed.  The bedroom prominently features a television set, which Elvis watched to relax.  Unlike the modest house she left behind in West Germany, where it was easy for her to interact with a member of her family, Graceland has many rooms.  She must walk down hallways to find him in his office or in his music listening room.

Also, Coppola utilizes background characters to express how much Priscilla’s life is being defined by people she doesn’t know.  When she’s in West Germany, she talks freely with girls in her class.  When she attends that fateful party at Elvis’ house, she overhears people quietly asking about her in the background while she stands by herself.  Then, when she’s attending Catholic school, her classmates talk openly and derisively about her while she walks the halls and sits in class.

Another visual cue that Coppola uses to show how much Priscilla’s life is changed is through how her meals are depicted.  Before she met Elvis, Priscilla ate her meals around a small table near the kitchen with her parents.  After she moves into Graceland, she sits at a long dining room table with all of Elvis’ friends.  Because of the size of his group, the cook serves everyone huge trays of fried chicken.  In her new life, Priscilla is permitted to sit with the group but she’s an outsider, relegated to a corner seat away from almost everyone.  She’s unable to be heard over the rambunctious conversations taking place.  Priscialla went from having serious conversations with her parents over dinner to not being able to speak with her husband until long after dinner ended.  (The movie makes a point of how the two were the closest when they stayed in their room for days and had their meals delivered to them like room service.)

Coppola also uses her actors’ notable height disparity to symbolize how childlike Priscilla was in comparison to Elvis.  In real life, Priscilla was only nine inches shorter than Elvis.  In the movie, Elordi is nearly a foot and a half taller than Spaeny.  In the few scenes when the movie shows the two of them upright and in full view, Elvis towers over Priscilla.  One example is when Elvis takes Priscilla to the hospital, when she still looks tiny even though she sports a bouffant hairstyle.

Finally, Coppola uses Priscilla’s childlike nature to sharply contrast her behavior with that of Elvis and his friends.  Even though Priscilla is small, young and has a very limited real-world view, she always wants to be an adult with Elvis.  He, on the other hand, prefers to goof around with his friends.  The scene where Elvis knocks down the old house with a backhoe is a prime example of how he’s not as mature as his teenage wife.  When Priscilla offers up some respectable criticism of a potential song, he throws a chair at a wall.  When Elvis says he wants to separate with her while she is pregnant, Priscilla plays it cool and forces his hand.  As Priscilla’s awareness grows, she becomes an adult who realizes that her husband is a basically  spoiled teenager.

I mentioned several themes in Priscilla that Coppola has explored in her previous films above.  The one that Coppola emphasized the most in this movie is how dangerous it is to live one’s life in a bubble.  In many ways, Priscilla is a mirror image of Marie Antoinette.  In both, a wide-eyed ingénue finds herself living the glamorous life courtesy of an obscenely wealthy husband.  From that point on, the two movies are polar opposites in how they depict that life, as well when reality eventually brings everything crashing down.

Marie Antoinette reveled in her pampered life with her husband, The King, and well-to-do friends.  In the end, the Revolution awakens her to life outside the castle and her life meets a tragic end.  Priscilla Presley, on the other hand, is unable to enjoy her newfound status as wife of The King because she spends most of her time alone.  When Elvis is home, she has to wait patiently for his attention because she’s not included in his inner circle.  In the end, she finally admits that her marriage is over and triumphantly leaves Elvis.  Unlike Marie Antoinette, who didn’t realize how dangerous her life in a bubble had become until too late, Priscilla Presley was able to leave on her own terms.

Lastly, the movie features none of Elvis’ recordings.  In their place are a collection of songs from the Sixties, such as “Venus” by Frankie Avalon and Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s”, as well as an equal number of songs that don’t fit the period, like The Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” and Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me” from 1992.  Coppola has done this before, most notably in Marie Antoinette.  This approach has given her movies a decidedly personal touch as well as a timeless quality, where Coppola transforms the soundtrack into a mixtape.  The most powerful song choice of all was when Dolly Parton’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” played while Priscilla drove away from Elvis to chart her own life.  I thought Elvis had covered it, given how it sounds like the perfect song for him.  A Google search turned up an interview where Parton says how she wrote the song with Elvis in mind, but refused to sell the half of the rights to Colonel Parker.  According to Parton:

“See, Elvis loved the song. In fact, I talked to Priscilla not very long ago. She said, ‘You know, Elvis sang that song to me when we were walking down the courthouse steps when we got divorced,’” Parton revealed.

With this in mind, it makes perfect sense for Coppola to use it not as Elvis’ final testament of eternal love, but instead as Priscilla’s “walking out the door” song.