"Priscilla" is the Elvis Biopic We Deserve
Sofia Coppola's new film, about the wife of the King of Rock and Roll, unfolds with the melancholic nostalgia of a Frank Ocean album.
The opening shots of Priscilla tell you just what it means to be married to the King of Rock and Roll. We watch as Mrs. Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) engages in her morning makeup routine: fake eyelashes, deep-hued nail polish, visibly expensive lip gloss. The camera, in extreme close-up, trains itself on each detail of this arduous process, emphasizing the exhaustive effort that goes into Priscilla’s everyday appearance—an appearance defined and manicured by her husband’s impulsive whims. In Sofia Coppola’s new film about the long-suffering wife of Elvis Presley, these images—these starkly-rendered tokens of idealized feminine beauty—become revealed as tokens of feminine entrapment.
Elvis projected a bombastic image, after all, and being “his woman”—a phrase he repeats often throughout the film—was never going to be an easy job. “He could get any girl he wants” goes the saying at the time, particularly on the US military base in Bad Nauheim, West Germany, where Elvis (Jacob Elordi) has been stationed during his army phase. It’s all the stranger, then, when he sets his eyes upon 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, a reserved girl with perceptive eyes and an air of calm intelligence. She’s cautious about his interest: She knows not to get swept up in the magnetism of a man ten years her senior. But when that man happens to be Elvis—well, romantic reservations can be hard to maintain.
To his credit, Elvis’ interest seems authentic. Elordi plays the King as a homesick puppy in these early scenes: a 24-year-old child still mourning his mother’s death, confessing intimacies to Priscilla in a state of homesick disarray. She responds in kind, finding herself quickly falling in love with a world-famous rockstar, and Priscilla—a beautiful, sad, and absorbing tale of female isolation—captures this infatuation with a dreamlike poignancy. And all throughout the film, Coppola centers us squarely in Priscilla’s perspective, shooting her trapped POV with elegant cinematic simplicity: We are transported into her lonely, desirous world.
Sarah Flack’s fluid editing style keeps the film flowing effortlessly between scenes, as in early sequences depicting Priscilla’s excitement at a world of Rock n’ Roll thrills. Not a moment after Elvis has met her for the first time do we see him asking her parents (her sweetly protective mother Ann, played by Dagmara Domińczyk, and her stern commandant stepfather Paul, played by Ari Cohen) if she might take a couple weeks off of school so that she could visit him in Memphis—he offers to pay the first-class ticket from Europe to Tennessee. They accept his request (the first of many catastrophic acts of parental disregard) and suddenly we find ourselves whisked away to Graceland, then to Las Vegas, then back to West Germany, where Priscilla returns to her parents with an utterly disheveled appearance: her hair is frazzled, makeup streaks disastrously from her eyes. With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Coppola is telling us that Priscilla’s relationship will transform into a toxic one.
Which is not to say that this lack of subtlety is a bad thing. Much of Priscilla’s emotive power stems from its utter unambiguity, as when Elvis convinces Priscilla’s parents to let her move in with him in Graceland in her senior year of high school—his coup de grâce upon Beaulieu family unity. When she moves into Graceland, her life becomes tragically isolated: She is left alone, daydreaming for weeks at at time while Elvis is off shooting movies in LA. Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd captures this solitude with a brilliant emphasis of negative space, framing Spaeny, already overwhelmed by Elordi’s imposing presence (the dude is six-foot-five), within the doubly crushing imposition of Graceland’s grand hallways, empty lawns, and high-tech bedrooms. Le Sourd’s lush, soft-lit photography evokes the emotional essence of 1960s Kodachrome, making Priscilla appears as a princess trapped in a spiral tower, with Elvis’ overly strict father Vernon (Tim Post) serving as the fire-breathing dragon that prohibits her independence.
The film’s narrative operates with similar blunt-force potency. There are several scenes in which Vernon and the rest of the Graceland staff prevent her from everyday activities: She isn’t allowed on Graceland’s front lawn (she is causing “a spectacle” of herself before the ever-present paparazzi), nor is she allowed to work a job outside of the house—as Elvis’ girl, she must live a life of loyal solitude. Worst of all, she isn’t allowed any friends outside of Elvis’ hometown boys, the Memphis Mafia, whose never-leave-the-group mentality brings to mind hyper-possessive mob families in the vein of The Sopranos. Priscilla’s life thus becomes inextricably defined by Elvis’ charismatic control, which he manages to inflict even when he off gallivanting in Hollywood. He keeps her trapped at home like a precious family diamond—hidden, locked away, revealed only in privacy and confidence.
Priscilla brings to mind Spencer on more than one occasion, Pablo Larraín’s inventive 2021 psychological drama about Princess Diana—another woman famously contained by suppressive fame. Both films espouse similar princess-in-a-tower narratives, but where Larraín managed to sustain its stressful tone for the better part of two hours, Priscilla eventually gets bogged down in its protagonist’s loneliness. As Priscilla grows from being Elvis’ teenaged paramour, then kept woman, then rockstar’s wife, Coppola continues to portray her as a woman torn apart by seclusion and objectification. It all becomes repetitive quicker than it should. Without a thematic statement beyond “Priscilla was left alone by a man who didn’t care,” these recurrent sequences rapidly lose steam.
Scenes involving both Priscilla and Elvis are much more successful, especially those that pit Priscilla’s desires against Elvis’ insecure masculinity. Elvis refuses to engage sexually with Priscilla at any point before marriage is the result of legal and moral concerns, to be sure; it also stems from a supercharged Madonna-whore complex that keeps her at an unreasonably sanctified distance. This stands in marked contrast to his dalliances with various starlets in Los Angeles—he seems perfectly willing to view them as playthings, to which Priscilla is less than pleased. Elvis’ impulses are a fascinating touchstone to watch throughout the film: We witness Priscilla confront her fickle husband less and less as time goes on. Early in their relationship, Priscilla rages at her husband for his much-publicized involvement with Ann-Margret—he casually dismisses the accusation, and then throws in some impulsive gaslighting for good measure. Such a scene stands in marked contrast to one later in the film, when Elvis, in a pitying test of loyalty, tells Priscilla that it might be best for them to spend some time apart. Her response—“Just tell me when you need me to leave, and I’ll pack a bag”—is the mark of a woman acquiescing to her husband’s absurdities. She is fed up and frustrated, and when she leaves the room, Elvis yells weak apologies after her. She refuses to engage.
Spaeny plays the scene perfectly, and indeed her magnificently modulated performance in the film is one of the year’s best. There’s a fifteen-year span of personality change that occurs in Priscilla: We watch the starstruck 14-year-old girl in Bad Nauheim grow into a 27-year-old mother discovering a life her own. Capturing the emotional impact of such long-term growth is a hard thing to do, but Spaeny is convincing across the entire timeline, shifting her character’s habits and tendencies with just enough subtlety to convey a change in personhood. She slowly develops familiarity with the Memphis Mafia; she grows accustomed to her husband’s controlling habits. All throughout, Coppola drip-feeds these changes to us with quiet, deliberate direction. Priscilla’s evolution occurs incrementally, and is all the more powerful for it.
Elordi is similarly excellent as the drugged-up and self-obsessed rockstar whose otherworldly fame keeps him at odds with quotidian existence. There’s an air of inscrutability to his rendition of Elvis that keeps him at a distance, which might be an issue if it weren’t part and parcel of Priscilla’s thematic achievement. Just as Priscilla herself is trying to unpack her enigma of a husband, so too is the audience struggling to uncover the meaning of his performance.
It helps that Elordi is himself a burgeoning movie star with weirdo tics of his own, possessing the kind of Jeremy Strong-like overcommitment to his craft that makes him utterly unafraid of being truly villainous. In one superbly terrifying scene, Elordi violently throws a chair just next to Priscilla’s head after she makes a negative comment. It narrowly avoids smashing into her; she is left shocked and frightened. Elordi’s fury in the scene is nerve-jangling, but so are the meek, poisonous apologies that follow immediately afterward—evident signs of an abusive partner.
It’s a strange coincidence that Priscilla has released in theaters a little less than a year and a half after Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s traditional cradle-to-grave biopic of Mr. Presley. The comparison between the two raises rich questions of cultural representation, and despite the fact that I found much to dislike in Luhrmann’s orgiastic act of hero-worship, there’s a case to be made that the cultural history of Elvis isn’t complete without the both of them. At its best, Elvis captured the sexual ecstasy of the King’s live performances, with fantastic dynamic filmmaking that accentuated his electric achievements. At its worst, the film excused, denied, or outright ignored Elvis’ appropriations and toxic impulses, instead choosing to lay blame at the feet of Colonel Tom Parker, played by an unusually bad Tom Hanks. The other half of the Elvis story is the one told in Priscilla, a tale of abuse and self-discovery told from the perspective of the woman who loved and suffered the most in his presence. The film has a tone that often borders on the elegiac—the result of a script adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. Rather than viewing him as the Great Performative Genius that he is so called in American cultural memory, Priscilla treats Elvis as a source of unwitting charismatic cruelty, choosing instead to look at his loved ones with a sad, sympathetic eye.
But Priscilla, a very good film, does not have to be understood within Elvis’ towering cultural context. The film exists on its own terms, one that tells the story of a woman’s relationship to a man whose ego left little room for others. Coppola presents the film under a narrative structure that unfolds with the melancholic nostalgia of a Frank Ocean album, in which snippets of the past are relived in present and past tense simultaneously. Priscilla’s best and most distinctive feature is its sense of Priscilla Presley, elder divorcee, dreaming her memories of the past into celluloid before our very eyes. We watch as she recalls the traumas and triumphs that made her into the woman she is today, from fourteen to twenty-seven, and all the while there is the feeling of that young girl in Bad Nauheim meeting Elvis for the first time. Through him, she discovered the meaning of her femininity in the context of a rockstar: charismatic, neurotic, and troublingly possessive.