Monthly Archives: January 2024

  • Priscilla

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2023)

    It begins with small bare feet, the toenails painted coral pink, moving through the deep pile of a colour-coordinated carpet.  The camera watches a hand apply false lashes to a close-up eye before a more extended tour of décor – furniture, ornaments and other stuff that may have cost plenty but still look tacky.  Writer-director Sofia Coppola’s film-making has often been fascinated by the surfaces and textures of the trappings of affluence but perhaps never more so than in Priscilla (though I’ve not seen Marie Antoinette (2006)).

    The screenplay is based on Elvis and Me, a 1985 memoir written (with Sandra Harmon) by Priscilla Presley, who served as executive producer on the film.  Although you don’t expect a conventional biopic from Coppola, Priscilla‘s early scenes hardly subvert the genre.  In 1959, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu is living on a military base in West Germany with her mother and stepfather, who’s a US air force captain.  A chance meeting with one American soldier leads to an invitation to a party hosted by another – twenty-four-year-old Elvis Presley, halfway through his two-year military service.  At the party, Elvis and Priscilla get talking; soon after, and despite her parents’ concerns, they start dating.  She’s bereft when he returns to America the following year but Elvis doesn’t forget Priscilla.  In 1962, he gets back in touch, tells her he loves her and asks that she come to live at Graceland.  After a transatlantic trip during which she meets his family and entourage and does drugs with Elvis for the first time, Priscilla returns to Germany but persuades her mother and stepfather to let her move to Memphis long term.  Elvis assures the Beaulieus that he’ll enrol Priscilla in a decent Catholic school to obtain the few credits she still needs for high-school graduation, and he’s as good as his word.  On graduation day, he readily agrees to Priscilla’s request that he stay away from the ceremony so as not to upstage her class.  Diploma in hand, Priscilla emerges from the ceremony to find the nuns who taught her getting their picture taken with Elvis.

    Things still happen from this point on in Priscilla – which continues through to 1973 and the end of the title character’s six-year marriage to Elvis – yet it all but comes to a stop once she’s ensconced, and entrapped, at Graceland.  Coppola’s preoccupation with the place’s house rules, its totems and taboos, is nearly all-consuming.  Priscilla’s life there is described minutely but barely dramatised at all.  Sequence after sequence illustrates her bird-in-a-gilded-cage isolation.  I’m not sure why Coppola has her cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd – just as in their collaboration on The Beguiled (2013) – half-light so many of the images but you  can still see that these are artfully composed; even so, you get impatient with their making the same point repeatedly.  The Graceland ménage is nearly the reverse of the set-up in The Beguiled, whose action takes place in a girls’ school that plays host to, and virtually takes prisoner, a soldier wounded in the American Civil War:  Elvis’s male pals/acolytes are less individual, though, than the earlier film’s teenage girls.  When he’s in residence, Elvis has Priscilla model dresses to an audience of him and his hangers-on, and decrees what she can and can’t wear.  When he’s away in Hollywood making movie musicals, Priscilla is left to read in papers and magazines about his alleged romances with co-stars, from Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas (1964) to Nancy Sinatra in Speedway (1968).  In a rare access of autonomy, Priscilla turns up in Los Angeles to confront Elvis about the former liaison but he soon sends her back to Graceland.

    Priscilla in the film is more emphatically a child bride than she was in reality: her actual height is 5’ 4” and Elvis was just under six feet tall; Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla, is 5’ 1” and Jacob Elordi’s Elvis 6’ 5”.  When they marry and stand beside their wedding cake, topped by miniature bride and groom figures, you realise what Priscilla has kept reminding you of.  In Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), prodigious hairdos sometimes threatened to overpower even Sissy Spacek – and Loretta Lynn got out incomparably more than Priscilla‘s young protagonist.  The colossal dyed-black beehive prescribed by Elvis weighs Priscilla down and compounds her lack of freedom.  She’s all the more burdened when her diminutive body is carrying a baby.  (On the subject of encumbrance, it’s a relief – probably for Jacob Elordi as well as the viewer – that the film ends before Elvis’s alarming weight gain in his last years.)  Yet in spite of a height difference that often looks cartoonish, both main actors do well, especially Cailee Spaeny.

    I had seen Spaeny before but didn’t recognise her from her TV role in HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021).  When she first appears in Priscilla, I assumed I was watching an adolescent actress who’d turn into the leading lady a few years later.  Actually in her mid-twenties, Spaeny is remarkably credible as a fourteen-year-old – and ages very convincingly over the film’s fourteen-year timeframe.  In the opening scenes, whisked into the orbit of someone she has idolised along with the rest of her generation, the heroine is in an incredulous daze.  Sequestered in Graceland, she still seems like an Elvis fan though a frustrated and suspicious one, too:  Spaeny’s ability to suggest what Priscilla’s thinking – in a situation that annuls her intelligence – gives the film what little dramatic tension it has.

    Elvis rules the roost – but roost is the word:  he spends less time in the film on stage or in the recording studio than he does in bed.  He occasionally reads spiritual handbooks there; more often, he’s doped or at least dopey – Priscilla has to work hard to wake him up with the news that she has gone into labour.  Despite this demeaning conception of Elvis, Jacob Elordi makes him oddly likeable (Elordi managed something similar with his character in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, also against the odds).  Although Elvis’s lifestyle is decidedly not grounded in reality, Elordi looks and sounds less artificial than Austin Butler did in Elvis (or in as much of Baz Luhrmann’s picture as I could sit through).  Elvis is playing the piano when Priscilla arrives at his party at the start.  Later, in the company of Priscilla and his laddish retinue, he watches himself in musical action on TV – but keeps averting his eyes while Priscilla grins and the boys whoop and holler at the screen.  On the whole, Coppola is intent on presenting an Elvis Presley divested of the musical and performing qualities that made him Elvis Presley.  The soundtrack features no Elvis numbers but a selection of familiar, approximately contemporary pop tunes – which works well enough until Elvis’s voice gets to be conspicuous by its absence.

    The movie’s scrupulous inertia falters in the closing stages.  Priscilla’s abandonment of the beehive for a freer hairstyle heralds her journey to relative independence in the early 1970s.  She and Elvis lead increasingly separate lives – Priscilla mostly in California, where she has karate lessons and takes a shine to her instructor.  But it’s Sofia Coppola who suddenly seems anxious for the Presleys’ marriage to end.  She starts inserting signals that Elvis is spiralling down through substance abuse – pills on his bedside table, an inebriated attempt to have sex with his wife that’s clumsily unsuccessful.  Priscilla escapes from this and from him.  Announcing that she’s filing for divorce, she abruptly turns feminist:  ‘You’re losing me to a life of my own’.  At the last moment, even Coppola’s carefully considered soundtrack choices break down.  Most of these are melodically apt but with lyrics no more than obliquely relevant to what we’re seeing at the time.  In contrast, Priscilla walks out of Graceland to the accompaniment of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (the original Dolly Parton version).  She then gets into her car and heads towards the gates of the property.  Priscilla has had so little agency in the film it comes as a surprise that she learned to drive.

    10 January 2024

  • One Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Hawes (2023)

    The title of James Hawes’s drama echoes the scriptural precept (written in the Quran and the Talmud) that ‘… whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity’.  Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake’s screenplay is based on the biography of a man who saved more than one life.  In the months before the outbreak of World War II, Nicholas Winton co-ordinated the rescue of 669 children, the vast majority of them Jewish, by arranging their passage from Prague to Britain and homes for them in this country.  Long after the event, the operation became known as the ‘Czech Kindertransport’ and the prime mover behind it was dubbed ‘the British Schindler’.  Born in Hampstead in 1909 to German-Jewish parents who had recently settled in London, Winton was a stockbroker at the time of the Kindertransport; post-war, he worked for, among other agencies, the International Refugee Organisation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.  His work in the late 1930s came to public attention only in the late 1980s.   He was knighted for ‘services to humanity’ in 2003.  He died twelve years later, at the astonishing age of 106.

    One Life tells a heroic and an inspiring story but, until its closing stages, is frustratingly uninspired.  This is due partly to the narrative structure, which alternates between events in 1938-39 and 1987-88 and, within the earlier timeframe, what happens in Prague and in London.  While thirty-year-old Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn) is in the Czech capital, it’s his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) who forthrightly cuts through the British red tape obstructing her son’s initiative.  In 1987, the septuagenarian Nicholas (Anthony Hopkins) lives in comfortable but somehow thwarted retirement in Maidenhead with his Danish wife Grete (Lena Olin).  There’s little synergy between these different parts of the narrative; although it becomes a bit more focused once Nicholas and his mother are on screen together, James Hawes continues to rely too much on montages of envelopes getting sealed and opened, documents stamped, family photographs looked over – with Volker Bertelmann’s hard-working score underlining, mostly unnecessarily, the meaning of what we see.  More important, the 1930s sequences, without being poorly staged or played, have a stubbornly standard-issue feel that robs them of independent life.

    Things change in the film’s last half hour, through the agency of two surprising subsidiary heroes of the story, both now late and unlamented – the long-running BBC consumer affairs programme That’s Life! and Robert Maxwell.  In 1988, Nicholas Winton met with Maxwell’s wife Elisabeth (played in One Life by Marthe Keller), a respected Holocaust researcher.  He showed her his recently rediscovered 1938-39 scrapbook which contained the names and photographs of the children rescued from Czechoslovakia, as well as the names and addresses of families that took in these young refugees.  Seeing One Life the day after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents cache in America made it even harder than usual to have positive feelings about the Maxwell clan; but it was Robert Maxwell, presumably with his wife’s encouragement, who contacted That’s Life! about Nicholas Winton’s efforts on behalf of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia and it was Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! team that assisted in tracking these survivors down.  Winton was invited to attend a recording of the show as a member of the studio audience and seated in the front row next to a middle-aged woman who, unknown to him, had come to Britain as one of his refugees.  He was invited back for another That’s Life! programme for which the entire studio audience comprised ‘Winton’s children’ or their descendants.  (The Czech youngsters who went on to distinguished careers in Britain included, by the way, the film-maker Karel Reisz and the Labour MP and subsequent peer Alf Dubs.)

    ‘But it’s such a silly show!’ says Grete Winton when her husband first mentions That’s Life!  He doesn’t disagree with her; it’s vaguely unseemly that this was how Winton’s great achievements were brought publicly to light; and Samantha Spiro’s version of Esther Rantzen in One Life would look crude even in a quick-fire impressions show.  Yet the sequences in the TV studio and Winton’s reunion with people whose lives he saved are unarguably moving and give James Hawes’s film a much-needed shot in the arm.  So does the narrative’s eventual concentration on the elderly Nicholas Winton, which allows Anthony Hopkins the uninterrupted screen time he deserves.  Hopkins was approaching his eighty-five birthday when the film was shot in late 2022.  He has always been a gifted, charismatic performer but his work in The Father (2020) and now here is that of a master actor, creating a richly detailed personality with the minimum of evident technique.  Hopkins makes you wonder if anyone has ever got to be as good on the cinema screen as he now is, at such an advanced age.  (Judi Dench doesn’t really count:  she was already in her sixties – and already great – by the time she started making films regularly.)  Despite a less than penetrating script, Hopkins’s portrait of Nicholas Winton feels, even in the early stages of the film, real.  He’s often funny, too – not least in one treasurable scene between him and Jonathan Pryce, Hopkins’s The Two Popes (2019) co-star, playing the older version of one of Winton’s colleagues in the Prague rescue effort.

    The stirring effect of the last part of One Life is, of course, to render the 1930s scenes – what should be the dramatic and emotional guts of the story – all the more marginal but Hopkins’s performance makes that a price worth paying.  It should be said that Johnny Flynn, though inevitably eclipsed by his senior partner in the role, does well as Winton:  Flynn has warmth, blends sensitivity with single-mindedness and, without seeming to imitate Hopkins, anticipates aspects of the older man.  This comes through strongly in the very last flashback to 1939.  In old age, Winton is still riddled with regret that the final, 250-strong group of children due to leave Prague on 1 September 1939 was prevented from doing so by Hitler’s invasion of Poland on the same day and the outbreak of war across Europe.  The stricken faces of the younger Nicholas, as he realises the implications of this, and his older self reflecting on it, are eloquently juxtaposed.  Helena Bonham Carter is entertaining as Barbara (Babi) Winton and Romola Garai makes Doreen Warriner, another of the unsung British humanitarian heroes working in Prague, remarkably individual, given the material she has to work with.  The same goes for Michael Gould, as a harassed British bureaucrat negotiating between the rule book and his conscience.

    4 January 2024

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