Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Haunting, Powerful Look at Elvis as the Ultimate Flawed First Boyfriend
She's taking care of business in a calm and deliberate manner!
Before I watched Priscilla last night I read an article about how Lisa Marie Presley had read the screenplay for the film, an adaptation of her mother’s best selling 1985 memoir Elvis & Me and was mortified.
In emails to writer-director Sofia Coppola, a woman who knows what it’s like to be the daughter of a show-business legend, Lisa Marie said that her father “only comes across as a predator and manipulative.”
According to Variety, Lisa Marie wrote to the filmmaker, “As (Elvis’) daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?”
This put Lisa Marie in direct conflict with a mother she professed to be protective towards because Priscilla not only wrote the book that inspired the film; she also praised its realism and served as the film’s executive producer.
Lisa Marie seemed borderline despondent about the portrayal of her father in the film. She told Coppola that she would come out strongly against the film when it was released but, in a horrifying bit of synchronicity, Lisa Marie died young under mysterious and unfortunate circumstances just like her father and ex-husband did. Lisa Marie would not live to see the opening of what was easily the biggest and most ambitious auteur-driven movie about her immediate family since 2022’s Elvis.
I understand Lisa Marie’s rage. There are things she would very much like the world to forget about her father and her mother’s relationship, or, even better, to not know about it in the first place.
More specifically Lisa Marie, and everyone else with a vested interest in Elvis’ complicated, contradictory memory and legacy, would like to do one of those Men in Black mind-wipes and instantly eliminate the world’s unfortunate knowledge that what has been portrayed as one of the great musical romances began with a grown man romantically pursuing a fourteen year old girl.
How do you get around that? The immediate answer is that you don’t get around something like that. You acknowledge that it’s sick and wrong and predatory and not something that can be excused or forgiven because it was a different time.
Coppola does not shy away from the fact that the main character in her film—Priscilla, pointedly, not Elvis—was a literal child when arguably the most desired adult male grown up in the world began pursuing her romantically.
The Lost in Translation director, whose breakthrough film, incidentally, was about the electric connection between an established movie star played by a fifty-two year old man and a woman played by a seventeen year old actress, softens the central dynamic by stressing that while, yes, Elvis was playing tonsil hockey with a ninth grader while he was the biggest rock star in the world but their bond is portrayed as romantic but not sexual until Priscilla is an adult.
In that respect Coppola is following the book that inspired the film. Priscilla says that she did not have sex with Elvis when she was underage. She could be lying to protect her late husband’s image but Elvis was a weird dude with a lot of weird hang-ups when it came to sex so it is entirely possible that Elvis and Priscilla did a whole lot of heavy petting until it was legal for her to go all the way.
I’m mortified but not particularly surprised by how many legendary musicians had a thing for middle-school age girls. Jerry Lee Lewis famously married his 13 year old cousin and R. Kelly’s insatiable hunger for underage girls will hopefully result in him dying in jail, a broken shell of a man.
In Mayte Garcia’s empathetic and compelling memoir of her relationship with Prince she writes that she was similarly underage when her future mentor, partner and collaborator discovered her but that Prince was willing to wait until she had reached the age of consent before pursuing a sexual relationship with her.
When Priscilla begins its title character is just fourteen years old. It’s not an old fourteen either. She’s not precocious or wise beyond her years or an old soul: she’s just a kid. As played with sensitivity, empathy and vulnerability by Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla is a doe-eyed innocent thrust into an exciting, strange and glamorous world at a period in her life when most girls are experiencing their first crushes or making out in the back seats of cars.
The very young woman’s life changes forever when she’s invited to a party at Elvis’ home while living in Germany with her military father. The King of Rock takes a shine to Priscilla precisely because she is so pure.
Priscilla was Elvis’ good girl. That was the role she played in his life. She was a virgin, untouched, with nothing in the way of a romantic or sexual history to contend with.
It’s disconcerting watching an adult passionately kiss a child but Elvis spends much of Priscilla’s runtime NOT having sex with his MUCH younger girlfriend. The film portrays Priscilla as a young woman with sexual needs that needed to satisfied but who was continually rejected by her partner because it wasn’t the right time or the right place.
Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker of dazzling images and gorgeous surfaces. Priscilla’s job here is to be beautiful but it goes beyond that. Elvis needs his partner to represent a feminine ideal, the ultimate girl you can take home to mother except that Elvis’ saintly mother is dead.
In that respect Priscilla serves as both a mother and a daughter figure for Elvis. Like a mother she takes care of Elvis and listens to him and tries to tame his wild ways. Like a daughter she’s someone that Elvis can shape and mold into his conception of perfection.
Elvis treats Priscilla like a porcelain doll that he can dress up and talk to and take with him but that is fragile and breakable.
In Coppola’s telling Elvis had a Madonna-Whore complex. Elvis could get sex anywhere, from anyone, but Priscilla was unique in part because for the most part he did not have sex with her, perhaps because doing so would compromise his image of her as the embodiment of snowy white purity.
Coppola zooms in on the decadent details of Priscilla’s beautiful, lonely life as the oft-neglected wife of a legend, particularly the cosmetics, hairspray and clothes that transform her from a little girl to the image of continental sophistication.
There’s a wonderful moment late in the film when Priscilla’s water has broken and she’s about to go to the hospital to give birth but first she makes sure that her eyebrows are perfect. Ejecting another human being from your body is no excuse for not looking your best.
Priscilla enters the court of the King in a privileged but fragile position. There was an army of flunkies and sycophants whose lives revolved around making the boss happy and if having a teenage girlfriend makes EP smile then it was their job to help the relationship along.
To help Priscilla keep up with her glamorous, exciting and moderately terrifying new life of leisure, privilege and fame he feeds her a steady supplies of pills he gobbles himself.
Elvis had maddeningly little control over his life and career. He pretty much had to do what the Colonel told him to but he could control this inexperienced young girl.
One of my favorite iterations of Elvis is Smart Elvis, who is just like Hillbilly Elvis except that he wears glasses, wants to be Marlon Brando and is obsessed with Eastern spirituality.
Elvis, got bless him, wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, so his conception of “deep” is awfully shallow.
Because of all the stress he was under, as well as the enormous amount of drugs he was on all time Elvis could be moody, erratic and violent.
He’s mostly harmless but sometimes scary due to his overlapping affection for indiscriminately popping pills, shooting guns and fucking shit up.
Priscilla briefly threatens to turn into Boogie Nights when its heroine gets lost in a world of pills, guns and bad behavior but it’s ultimately not interested in sensationalism but rather in exploring the complicated psyche of a girl thrust into a wild world beyond her imagination.
It’s a beautiful world filled with beautiful people and ineffable sadness. We almost never get to see Elvis onstage because the film ultimately is not particularly interested in that aspect of his life, the one everyone knows.
Coppola focusses instead on Elvis as a pretty predator who treated his wife so shabbily that she ultimately couldn’t take it any more and left.
Priscilla is a gorgeous, deeply sad movie that finds a revelatory angle on one of the most exhausted subjects in American pop culture.
It’s a woman’s take on an aggressively male world and that, ultimately, makes all the difference.
Four stars out of Five