The new movie Priscilla is about the teenager who married Elvis Presley. Sofia Coppola directs, and she wrote the screenplay with Sandra Harmon and Priscilla Presley herself. KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz says, the movie does not flatter Elvis Presley.
Sofia Coppola makes films about lonely young women, but she can sometimes be short-changed as a maker of films only with lovely surfaces. But her 2006 Marie Antoinette shows more — a young, naive woman from another country dumped into the dangerous, tumultuous then-center of the Western world with no formed sense of herself or moral compass.
Priscilla – as in Priscilla Presley – is also a kid jammed into a world way beyond her ability to understand or control it. At least Marie Antoinette was born to aristocracy.
At the start of this movie, Priscilla is the 13-year-old daughter of an Air Force captain stationed in Germany in 1958. Like a lot of military kids, her life was unstable – her biological father died in a plane crash when she was an infant; her mother remarried another Air Force officer; the family uprooted over and over as her stepfather was shipped to different posts.
Coppola shows the parents as stiff in their military ways, but also out of their depths about what to do with their daughter when this huge celebrity comes calling. A young officer asks permission to take Priscilla to a party to meet Elvis Presley. Of course, it was a major celebrity event when Elvis was drafted and sent to Germany. But it’s creepy when this grown-up guy wants to take this little girl to any kind of party – we all know how things turned out, and this young officer’s come-on instantly feels like he’s using his Elvis card to get into her pants.
But, Coppola’s version of Elvis doesn’t get used—he’s a user. Just in case you miss the clues: At the party, Elvis sings “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On,” a song Jerry Lee Lewis made popular. Lewis became infamous for marrying his 13-year-old cousin. Lewis was also notorious for drug use.
In bed at Elvis' Graceland mansion, he mumbles to Priscilla that it’s not time for sex yet. And then he slips her a sleeping pill.
It’s no wonder that the Elvis estate refused to let Sofia Coppola use any of Elvis’s songs in her movie. He looks like a predator — not the great rock ‘n’ roll singer — because he’s never shown performing. It’s a good tactic. If the film showed Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel,” we might start to like him.
Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla, is 25 years old and 5 feet 2 inches tall, but Coppola makes her look like she’s 10 years old in her little girl dresses. She's a tiny doll nestled up against Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis and is 6 feet 5 inches. It’s one of the telling images of the movie, little Priscilla sucked into the hustle and hype of Elvis Presley’s celebrity circle. Their sizes are as ill-matched as their selves.
The movie Priscilla does a real job on Elvis' character. He’s locked into his world of boys – he’s almost never without his gang of buddies, like a bunch of 14-year-olds with too much money, no discipline as adult human beings, and no clue about this girl-child that Elvis likes to hug and smooch. The whole flock goes with her to buy her clothes, and they choose dresses as if she’s their collective toy.
None of them, especially Elvis, has had to grow up. For most of the film, Priscilla looks like a package.
It’s a miracle at the end of the picture, when Priscilla finally collects herself to walk away and drive out the gates of Graceland. As director Coppola sees her, Priscilla Presley somehow manages to grow up in the years of being Elvis Presley’s kewpie doll. And if you’ve seen any of the three silly “Naked Gun” comedies Priscilla Presley made with Leslie Nielsen, she came through it all with talent and a good sense of humor.
