“Priscilla” (2023) is Sofia Coppola’s authorized adaptation of executive producer Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me.” The film is a gauzy, coming of age film about a teenage girl’s dream coming true then adjusting to the reality of that dream. Cailee Spaeny convincingly plays Priscilla from fourteen to twenty-eight years old leaving her family when they were stationed in West Germany to living at Elvis’ iconic Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.
I am not a Coppola fan because of the way that she reimagines and depicts history, but with Presley, I was not invested in Coppola getting it right or critiquing her framing of history. It did not hurt that she was getting the story from a primary source. Before dying, on September 2, 2022, (RIP) Lisa Marie Presley emailed Coppola, “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative. As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?” Um, but her mom cosigned Coppola’s film so this email should have been sent to a therapist and/or her mom. Coppola’s film is as flattering as it can be considering the facts of the story. Elvis isolated and played house with a child so he could have a human being’s life revolve around him. Sure he did not have sexual intercourse with her until they married at twenty-two years old, but she still slept in his bed, and he gave her drugs. The entire system failed to protect her from him and him from himself because he was tall, handsome (not in my book), rich and famous. The most powerful image is adoring nuns dressed in habits and surrounding Elvis (Jacob Elordi)—the same nuns that look at Priscilla sternly for having the same reaction. She is a child—what is the nuns’ excuse. I get that Lisa loved her dad, but her dad is problematic.
“Priscilla” works as a film because it shows and does not tell or editorialize. Coppola centers this journey through Priscilla’s silent perspective, and Priscilla is often thrilled to play the part of adoring partner oblivious to the parade of red flags. The film opens with Priscilla preparing for a typical day in Graceland, and the montage includes fragments of Priscilla and the estate as she assembles herself. There are close ups of the big, human eyelashes, the lacquered fingernails, the dyed black thick hair, the silk sheets, the shiny cars. Coppola’s cropped images convey that Priscilla is not a whole person, and until she achieves an identity independent from Elvis, Coppola refuses to shoot her in that context. The environment engulfs Priscilla: the entourage, the noise, the excess. While a child cannot consent, Priscilla is depicted as a willing participant who feels as if she snagged Prince Charming, blissfully unaware that she got admitted to a world that was not normal and downright dangerous. She is playing a part, and her life becomes a never-ending acting job with Elvis as her director choosing her wardrobe, her lines, and her movement.
Even the women in Elvis’ entourage think that it is strange to choose someone so young. Coppola compares the adult women with child Priscilla in the house party scenes. These women are chatting, taking up space, socializing with other people whereas Priscilla is quiet, observing, following orders. Priscilla is just excited to be there. When she is in Germany, Coppola shows how Americanized and artificial the environment is. It appears as if she is living in a replica of the US, not another country. It kind of makes sense that a child brought up to follow her stepfather’s noble but spartan career would extrapolate that Elvis’ offer to just exist in his space seemed like a step up and would consider it normal. Coppola shoots Spaeny walking down hallways, sitting in classrooms, and finally sitting and waiting around for Elvis. For Priscilla, at least when Elvis appeared, excitement followed.
“Priscilla” feels like watching a horror movie where everything looks lavish and seems like a fairy tale, but the castle belongs to Dracula though he does not unfurl his cape and fully reveal his fangs until the eleventh hour. Her life could have been so much worse. Some random man plucks her from a diner to meet Elvis. She hangs out in adult spaces with hard drinking adults. Her guardian is her boyfriend and has her staying in his bedroom for years while feeding her drugs. Much respect to the real-life Priscilla who owns the fact that she had difficulty even counting to twenty-one. She does not receive a real education or have a quiet space to study. She has no friends. His entourage of mostly men surround her. She almost overdoses on drugs. Any whiff of scandal follows her in whispers, not directed at the adult man who is the responsible one.
Elvis says that Priscilla is mature for her age, but he is immature for his, and most adult women would not put up with living in a frat house atmosphere even in spotless, luxurious conditions. He did not even leave instructions for people to look through the magazines and newspapers that Priscilla read so she would miss the media speculation on his love life. Spaeny’s eyes flash with anger at every betrayal. If “Priscilla” is a fascinating portrait of a girl becoming a woman, it is because she received zero tools to learn how to stand up for herself yet she learned how to acquire them in a world where Elvis is literally king and threatens her with exile whenever she steps out of line. In contrast, Elvis toes the line when the invisible Colonel snaps his fingers. The film gradually becomes a contrasting character study of survival and independence with Elvis failing.
By the denouement, Priscilla has become like one of the women at the parties. She drives her own car, is the center of discourse at a dinner party and engages in her own pastimes, learning karate with an instructor who was her lover, which is not revealed in “Priscilla.” Soon after this sequence follows the only time that Coppola depicts Elvis making onscreen sexual advances on Priscilla, and it feels like sexual assault. In real life, it was rape. Coppola respects Priscilla’s private, sexual life until it verges on becoming public by being criminal.
“Priscilla” may be the first time that I can fully appreciate a Coppola film. Depicting the surface is a kind of definitive truth. It is all that anyone witnesses, and we cannot know what is in someone’s heart even if we are present, but the surface confides some of what dwells in the soul. For Elvis, that single Brando poster on his wall reveals his inner ambition, which he never achieves and becomes the one entrapped in his fantasy. For Priscilla, it is that willingness to drive through the gates and abandon that way of life. Achieving autonomy is a mysterious, individual pursuit that the diminutive Priscilla, who later would become a professional actor and famous in her own right, grasped, and Elvis, the towering titan, did not.
Coppola and Spaeny depict Priscilla as a person who draws the line at taste. When she meets Elvis at his house in Germany, he quizzes her on who is popular in music. She becomes the personification of his success, the spokesperson for the masses of screaming, adoring teenage girls, his reassurance that he is still on top. Even when Priscilla agrees with Elvis that the songs being pitched to him are not appealing, he hates it and lashes out at her because it confirms his suspicion that he is not growing as an artist, his single insecurity and ambition. While she bows to his decisions on her appearance, she retains her own preferences. If there is a reason to love the real-life Priscilla, she drew the line at Elvis becoming an insufferable philosophy bro. Same, girl, same. Elvis just becomes a Ken with philosophizing being his version of playing a guitar on the beach. During a publicity shoot, Priscilla becomes the unofficial director and positions herself and her daughter around Elvis who appears imperial in his living room, but is also passive, not the dynamic man that she originally met. She also drinks in her daughter’s reactions to her and her nanny and recognizes her daughter’s relief at leaving her parents. Is Coppola perhaps in some way relating to Priscilla in her perspicaciousness?
