When Priscilla Wagner first steps onto the plush carpeting of Graceland, wearing mod kitten heels and her silky hair in a delicate ponytail, Elvis Presley easily hoists her into a twirling hug, before directing her upstairs to his bedroom—away from a grown-ups’ party in the living room. It’s an unnamed woman in said group who voices what we’re all thinking upon seeing shy, five-foot Priscilla in Elvis’ Memphis mansion: “Well … She’s like a little girl.”
She was. The real-life Priscilla—embodied by actress Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, the new film written and directed by Sofia Coppola—visited Memphis for the first time at 17 years old. Coppola’s story starts three years before then, when Priscilla and Elvis meet at a party in West Germany where both were stationed with the military (Priscilla with her Texan family, Elvis serving with an armored tank unit). She was 14. He was 24. The famed couple’s ten-year age gap has gone mostly unacknowledged in the general Elvis narrative, including director Baz Luhrmman’s hit film Elvis, which premiered last year. That film, which earned its star Austin Butler an Academy Award nomination, largely glossed over Elvis’ marriage. Coppola, in contrast, has placed Priscilla’s girlhood at the center of her movie. Her plot begins with ninth-grade Priscilla and follows her through first love, obsession, disappointment, pain and release. While Elvis ruminated on “the King’s” talent and vulnerability in the face of insidious management and fame, Priscilla brings the spotlight to, arguably, his own victim: the young woman who occupied his shadow. Priscilla comes 17 years after Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s sweet and sharp characterization of another young woman married off to a king. The director has established herself as a filmmaker attentive to female stories—often beautiful women and girls who are understood perfectly by themselves and their ‘sisters’ but mysterious to or unacknowledged by men in their periphery (as the virgins of The Virgin Suicides or the matriarchy of The Beguiled). Priscilla Presley, a girl brought into the public fold only to privately suffer, was a perfect outline for Coppola to fill. Spaeny’s Priscilla is gorgeous and convincingly teenaged. Her dead-eyed, nervous demeanor at the film’s opening is almost too potent to bear, and while Elvis praises her old soul, we giggle as she whines to strict parents at home, “Please don’t ruin my life.” Jacob Elordi, of Euphoria fame, is a functional Elvis. He plays Priscilla’s love interest with run-of-the-mill dumbness. He’s big. His Tennessee accent is correct. He exhibits no musical talent because the script does not call for it. (The movie’s soundtrack contains no Elvis.) Overall, Coppola’s film does little to remind you who Elvis actually is—a world-famous musician—and everything to establish him as, simply, a man. Scenes featuring Priscilla and Elvis are often darkly lit and quiet: He’s boring her by reading hippie philosophy aloud; she’s asking him on the phone when he might come home and being told he needs a woman who won’t complain about that sort of thing; he’s telling her, heavily pregnant, that he thinks they should take a break. But these bad-romance scenes are broken up by several sun-soaked, slow-motion vignettes of Elvis and his guy friends roughhousing—at the roller rink, in the yard—exhibiting a carefree boyness that draws attention to just how little fun is to be had by Priscilla, the actual kid in the picture. While Elvis stays the same, Priscilla’s maturation is measured in hair dye, makeup and the developing resolve of a wife who no longer believes in her husband. In an hour and 50 minutes, Priscilla tells the story of a girl who fell in love and got trapped in the hole. While its plot is engaging, the ending is abrupt, and I don’t remember any special visual or sonic entrancement, which should be required for a film whose plot is pre-written by history and therefore unoriginal. But where Coppola failed to make stylistically unique cinema, she succeeded in developing a convincing heroine. And particularly during the film’s last twenty minutes, one feels some secondhand pride in imagining that the real Priscilla, dead not a year, has finally said her peace. Her release is the reason Priscilla sticks around in the mind, like a layer of hairspray on the wedding bouffant.
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