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
