NYFF Review: Priscilla

Much of the action in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic, based on its titular subject’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me (Presley also serves as executive producer), takes place in the bedroom. This restrained, human-centric portrait of the famously toxic romance doesn’t hold back in exhibiting truth in these contained quarters. And yet mercifully, we never have to watch Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) and Elvis (Jacob Elordi) have sex. But that doesn’t stop the room from feeling like a prison cell for her. Where Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis from last year was a bombastic celebration of a flawed king, Priscilla shows us a normal man who wants to be king so bad he ruins the life of the woman closest to him. This is her story, however—just one with a clear villain.

The film starts with Priscilla in 1959. She’s a high school freshman living in West Germany with her parents, a military family. She’s lonely, sitting by herself drinking milkshakes at the local diner when she’s approached by a man in uniform who tells her she’d fit in well at the parties of one Elvis Presley, who’s living nearby for the moment. It takes some convincing of her parents (Dagmara Domińczyk and Ari Cohen, quietly giving two of the most layered performances in the film), but she’s eventually allowed to go. There, the already famous rock star immediately takes to her, having missed the company of someone from his hometown, history he and Priscilla happen to have in common. He invites her up to his bedroom for a more private conversation. Nothing happens, but there’s a manipulative and predatory vibe undercutting his attempts at connecting with her.

There’s an overall ick imbedded in the script as Elvis then continues to dote on her, grooming her while establishing troubling power dynamics as he initiates a courtship that will carry over into Priscilla reaching legal age. She, on the other hand, can’t help but become obsessed. She writes his name all over her school notebook, is hurt by every speculative affair in the gossip columns, and refuses to take interest in the other boys at school. After all, when Elvis Presley gives you seemingly romantic attention, what’s a teenager to do?

As history goes, they eventually settle into a forever lopsided, alienating relationship in which she’s more the princess locked in her tower than the queen to his purported king. But there’s no fairy tale at Coppola’s Graceland, as the only rescuer Priscilla relies on is her captor himself.

The director brings realism to one of pop culture’s larger-than-life figures in that it charts how far outside of reality Elvis’ head exists. The production design is surprisingly modest, with the classic kitsch some might associate with Elvis held in reserve to make them feel out of place (in the Graceland master bedroom lives statues of a tiger and Jesus Christ that stick out against tall black curtains and minimal natural light). The cinematography is largely formal until it subtly slips into bombast the more Elvis becomes his own caricature toward the end of the 1960s.

These visual contradictions of their would-be palace complement and contrast the matter-of-factness with which Coppola tells Priscilla’s story. There’s no narrative pomp and frills during the couple’s major life events. Elvis doesn’t even ask her to marry him, he just slips the ring on her finger while they sit on the edge of the bed, the stage for the performance she keeps falling for. Priscila telling him that she’s pregnant happens in a flash, Elvis seemingly more concerned with the reaction of his omnipresent posse of nameless male friends. Priscilla is his possession, his tool to play around with, Elordi’s careful yet confident portrayal thickening the air in Graceland so that it’s hard to believe Priscilla can move at all. (Any comparison between Elordi and Austin Butler is as useless as comparing Heath Ledger’s and Joaquin Phoenix’s Jokers. Priscilla and Elvis are movies with opposite intentions.)

There’s a detached quality to Coppola’s approach, similar to her other films where the experience as a whole is intended to make us feel something more after the fact than its individual moments as they happen. Still, Spaeny keeps the film engaging even when the film’s chill starts to feel a little dry in the second half. She communicates much in Priscilla’s timid silence, and makes a meal out of every rebellion, small or large. But most impressive is how she plays with her subject’s maturity, showing how such a romance can stunt a person’s emotional growth, even if they were once seen as “mature for their age.” In Spaeny’s eyes, we witness a teenage fangirl morph into a woman scarred.

But this isn’t the sort of biopic where the lead performance makes the film, great as she is. Priscilla succeeds for many reasons, but chief among them is Coppola’s assured direction, which leads us to a satisfying—and bravely abrupt—conclusion. The film may not have higher thematic ambitions than its honest portrait of grooming and the toxic relationship that follows, but the believable, challenging intimacy of its examination proves rewarding all on its own.