It was an atypical storybook romance. She was a pretty but inconspicuous 14-year-old Cinderella schoolgirl in saddle oxfords and a ponytail; he was the charismatic 24-year-old prince of rock & roll, whose gyrating hips shook postwar America out of its complacency. When Specialist Fourth Class Elvis Presley (Elordi) met ninth-grade Army brat Priscilla Beaulieu (Spaeny) at a party he hosted in 1959 while stationed in West Germany, the prospect of any future together – much less a 14-year relationship that would include marriage – registered as absurd as a pair of blue suede shoes. Early in Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s sanguine adaptation of co-executive producer Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, the oddball pairing of one of the Sixties’ most recognizable couples initially amuses as the baffled teenager sleepwalks the waking dream of being courted by one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. But what begins as every fangirl’s fantasy come true for the naïve Priscilla eventually reveals itself to be something toxic as her once perfect gentleman begins to control every aspect of her sheltered life, and she becomes his emotional prisoner in the cocooned castle of Graceland.
While last year’s bombastic Elvis reached (often beyond its grasp) to convey the short-lived icon’s musical and sociological imprint in pop culture, this antidote of sorts to Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biographical spectacle is a decidedly more intimate film, one seen through the callow feminine perspective of the title character. There are no familiar Elvis tunes, no showbiz razzmatazz, no duplicitous Colonel Parker to distract you from the core love story here. Indeed, you sometimes feel like a voyeur watching the two lovers as they whisper to each other or chastely lie in bed together during the cooing phase of their affair.
Because the passive Priscilla experiences Elvis’ troubling behavior over and over before she starts to push back, Spaeny’s performance plays at a dispassionate distance for a good while. But she anchors the movie with a steel-magnolia spine, subtly maturing before your eyes. Although Elvis is a secondary character who nevertheless drives the narrative, Elordi and his stuttering Southern drawl evoke Presley’s sweet cornpone charm and his fame-monster darkness without looking like he’s trying. You can’t take your eyes off of him when he’s onscreen. (That the actor is a hunk of burning love doesn’t hurt.) While Spaeny and Elordi both do and don’t resemble their real-life counterparts, their exaggerated height difference – 5’1” versus 6’5”, where Priscilla and Elvis actually stood at 5’4” and 6”, respectively – metaphorically communicates the intrinsic imbalance that always defined the Presleys.
Coppola’s deceptively languid directorial style perfectly suits her vision here. She doesn’t impose any overarching interpretation onto the film, but rather allows meaning to work its way into your consciousness. Watching Priscilla feels much like reading a book, with images of white pills pressed into open palms and home-movie montages enhancing the text. Once again, the younger Coppola demonstrates she is as accomplished a filmmaker in her own way as her father.
This article appears in Best of Austin: Restaurants 2023.