It’s difficult to resist the temptation to psychoanalyze Sofia Coppola through her films. As a girl, she was unfairly thrust into the arena of adults—miscast as Mary Corleone in her father’s Godfather 3—where she learned hard lessons about how cruel and unforgiving the world could be (the critics and public were…not kind).
As a filmmaker—in such works as Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Virgin Suicides—she has focused almost exclusively on innocence lost, on young girls stripped of their agency and thrust into worlds they’re not ready for.
It’s facile, obviously, to make the connection—there’s much more to Sofia Coppola, as an artist and as a person, than this bit of her biography. But that’s sort of the point. The young women she examines on screen—both fictional and real—all have interior lives that are rarely considered, much less explored by the world. Coppola aims to rectify that.
In that sense, Priscilla Presley, the focus of her latest feature, is the perfect Coppola subject. When you think of Priscilla Presley, what comes to mind? That she was pretty. That she married Elvis young. That her own life has been marked by tragedy (the loss of an ex-husband, grandson, and daughter). Rarely have we asked ourselves: What was it like for her to be courted by the most famous man in the world? Who really was she? (And rarely have we considered that she took Elvis’ flagging fortune after he died and turned it into an empire.)
When we meet her, she’s just 14. And Cailee Spaeny, the talented newcomer who plays Priscilla with a mixture of wide-eyed wonder and roiling strength, was at least partly cast because she looks so young. She’s at a diner on a base camp in Germany, where Elvis is fulfilling his military service, when she’s approached by a friend of Elvis’ inviting her to a house party.
The friend is a military man, and married, making him somehow less threatening, and it’s that veneer of respectability that ultimately convinces Priscilla’s parents (Dad is an army officer) to let her go. But what exactly is going on here? Why did Elvis’ friend approach Priscilla to begin with? Was he sent to stake out pretty American girls in Germany? Was he specifically looking for pretty young girls?
Coppola never answers that question, but it’s clear that Priscilla’s innocence is a huge part of what draws Elvis (Jacob Elordi) to her.
When Priscilla arrives at the party, in a babydoll dress with ribbons, she immediately becomes Elvis’ focus. He’s surprised she’s that young—he was hoping she was 16 or 17, not 14—but he’s undeterred.
He begins courting her—in almost a teen dream fantasy of what it might be like to date a rock star. He’s kind, gentlemanly, filled with gifts and compliments. He confides in her—telling her how much he misses his mother, who has recently died, and how much she reminds him of home.
Notably, he doesn’t have sex with her. And it becomes clear this is not because he’s waiting for her to turn 18, but because he suffers from what we used to call the “Madonna/whore complex.” Starlets, groupies, et al, are for sex (he cheats on Priscilla many times throughout their relationship). But Priscilla, whom he calls “Little One” and treats like some sort of precious Fabergé egg, is too pure for such things.
Once Priscilla is flown off the base and sent to live at Graceland permanently—she spends her senior year of high school at a Catholic school in Memphis where she’s gawked at and gossiped about—Elvis’ infantilizing of her becomes more frustrating.
For one, she wants to have sex. She has desires. But her desires are of no interest to Elvis. He begins to control every aspect of her life—what she wears, how she applies her makeup, the color of her hair (he likes black). And, once they get married and have Lisa Marie, we begin to see her chafe a bit under his authority. But whenever she complains, he threatens to exile her from Graceland—and his life. His temper comes out—he never strikes her, per se, but he becomes violent during a pillow fight when Priscilla shows a bit of gumption. He wants her to be demure, not aggressive.
Despite all the clothes, cars, and jewels a girl could ask for, Graceland becomes a kind of gilded prison for Priscilla. And life with Elvis becomes less a fantasy and more a nightmare.
Elvis doesn’t come across as a monster in this film—we sense his own arrested development, that he, too, was cast into a world of fame too soon, that he was permanently unmoored by his mother’s death. But this is not the hagiography of Baz Luhrmann’s recent biopic. Notably, we never see Elvis perform (except for a brief tinkling on the piano at a party and once, from behind, on stage as he wiggles his ass to the disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”). This is officially because Coppola could not secure the rights to Elvis’ music, but it works for the film, which is laser focused on Priscilla’s journey, not his.
Elvis, too, seems to be searching for meaning—we see him reading Buddhist books and taking psychedelic drugs, trying to find purpose in his own journey. But he’s simply too much the product of the patriarchy to view Priscilla as anything other than his personal property, or to reflect even slightly on what she’s going through.
And while Elordi doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting that was required of Austin Butler—who sang and danced and packed on the pounds to play Vegas Elvis—he makes an excellent Elvis Presley, particularly as he goes from dreamy gentleman caller to cruelly indifferent spouse. I was concerned that his height (he’s 6’5”!) would be distracting, but it works here—underscoring the contrast between man and girl; between power and vulnerability. And Spaeny, who won Best Actress for this role at the Venice Film Festival, is a real find as Priscilla, drawing us into her fears and aspirations. She’s in almost every minute of the film and she holds our attention easily, conveying her feelings with the slightest flash of her eyes or jut of her chin.
The muted Priscilla is so different from Luhrmann’s Elvis, in terms of tone, tempo, and palate, it almost seems like a rebuttal. But this is what Coppola does. She luxuriates in the details of a “girly” exterior—pink shag rugs, ornate jewelry boxes, false eyelashes, wardrobes of glamorous clothing—but equally demands that we look beyond those things.
Again and again, her films proclaim: There is so much more to this woman than meets the eye. Do not be distracted by the shiny baubles—something far more interesting happening here.