When it was announced that Sofia Coppola’s project would have her writing and directing an adaptation of Elvis & Me, Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir chronicling her 14-year-long relationship, which began when he was 24 and she was only 14, I admit that I was a bit perplexed by this decision. As an enormous fan of her previous films, I was eager to see it but I struggled to understand why she would want to tell that particular story in the first place—outside of a brief familial link forged when her cousin, Nicolas Cage, married her daughter, Lisa Marie, there didn’t really seem to be much about the story that obviously connected with her previous efforts. More than that, it seemed odd that she would want to tackle material that has been explored at great length so many times in the past, most recently in the nonsense that was last year’s bloated boondoggle Elvis.
Now that I have seen Coppola’s film, Priscilla, her interest makes much more sense as her take on the story, rather than simply offering a rehash of familiar details gleaned through decades of tabloid headlines, finds a new and fascinating approach to a saga that most viewers will be well-versed in long before purchasing a ticket. The result is an original and uncommonly affecting take that is not just one of the very best films of the year but, with the exception of Peter Guralnick’s celebrated two-volume Elvis biography, perhaps the most incisive analysis of the Presley mythos produced to date.
When we first meet Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) in 1959, she is, by all accounts, a seemingly ordinary teenage girl, the stepdaughter of a military man who has just relocated his family to his latest posting on a West German military base. Like many other girls her age, she is also a fan of rock star Elvis Presley, who was then in the area doing his own term of military service, and one day, she receives an invitation to a party at the singer’s nearby residence. Amazingly, she is able to convince her parents (Ari Cohen and Dagmara Dominczyk) to let her go and it is there that she first lays eyes on Elvis (Jacob Elordi) himself.
At first, he seems utterly removed from the commanding presence seen on Ed Sullivan—twiddling his thumbs rather than shaking his hips—but there is an undeniable connection between the two despite that queasy age differential. Of course, her parents don’t want her to see him any more but Elvis manages to somehow win them over with his courtliness and the two are soon spending glorious snatches of time together—going to see Beat the Devil (where Elvis recites the dialogue along with the onscreen actors) and talking about his dreams of one day becoming a serious actor—until the inevitable happens and Elvis returns home to American and Priscilla is left behind heartbroken and yearning to hear from him once again.
After a while, during which she constantly reads gossip about the latest starlet he is supposedly seeing, she gets a call from Elvis inviting her to fly out and stay with him for a few days. Realizing that saying no might only make things worse, her parents let her go and soon she is reunited with him at Graceland. Things don’t start off too swimmingly—he gives her a pill to help her sleep that knocks her out for two precious days—but rally with an impromptu trip to Vegas before returning home, where her parents see her disheveled look as she gets off the plane and realize with quiet horror that things will no longer be the same.
That becomes soon apparent when, in a move that continues to boggle the mind decades later, Priscilla’s parents accede to Elvis’s suggestion that she simply come and stay with him at Graceland while attending a nearby Catholic school in order to compete her education. At first, it all feels like a dream come true—while her classmates are merely swooning over Elvis, she is staying out all night with him and his entourage and fueled by an ever-increasing array of pills he gives her to help her keep up with the guys, go to sleep and help her make it through the school day. Before long, however, the dream begins to curdle as he almost immediately leaves to go shoot a movie, leaving her to sit around in the nearly empty house while the papers breathlessly discuss his alleged engagement to Ann-Margaret.
Even when he is home, things seem to have changed between them—although he is constantly sweet-talking her, he is just as apt to go off into hair-trigger rages over even her slightest challenges to him, such as wearing a style of dress he doesn’t care for or finding minor fault with the latest of the duds that made up the majority of his 60’s musical output. Most mystifyingly, when they are actually alone together at night, it appears that she is the only woman that he doesn’t want to have sex with and his demurrals make it clear that he sees her as some kind of possession—a living fetishistic totem representing innocence and purity—than as a person with needs of their own.
They do finally marry—in what feels more like the culmination of a carefully negotiated business arrangement than the happy ending of a love story—but apart from the brief effort undertaken to help usher Lisa Marie into the world, he continues his pattern of leaving her alone for long periods of time and either ignoring or upbraiding her when he is around, behavior fueled by his paranoia, his increased drug intake, his resurgent popularity following his 1968 comeback special and his knowledge that no one around him is ever going to stand up to him. Ironically, it is while Elvis is acting more childish—albeit a child with millions of dollars and numerous guns at his immediate disposal—that Priscilla finds herself growing up very quickly and realizing that something has to change, even if it means doing the once-unthinkable act of leaving him for good.
In many ways, Priscilla feels like Coppola delivering a sort of grand summation of the themes that have driven her as a filmmaker so far, ranging from the notion of seeing young women chafing under the rigidity of a social structure that fails to see them as anything other than delicate creatures in need of protecting (The Virgin Suicides, The Beguiled) to the tricky dynamics of parent-child relationships where the child often acts more adult than the putative grown-up (Somewhere, The Bling Ring, On the Rocks) to more basic feelings regarding desire, loneliness and the alternately pleasurable and painful aspects of wealth and celebrity . Of course, the most obvious point of comparison with her past work is with her 2006 masterpiece Marie Antoinette. Both films find Coppola attempting to recapture the narratives of women whose respective roles in history have tended to be informed by gossip than hard facts. Additionally, both involving marriages that look ideal on the surface but which involve only the slightest traces of genuine affection after “I do” as well as men who demonstrate virtually no sexual interest in their more-than-willing wives and opulent homes that, for all the lavish touches and instant gratification (with heaping piles of fried chicken replacing the equally omnipresent arrangements of petit fours), increasingly begin to feel like constricting prisons as time passes.
Another similarity between the two lies in Coppola’s basic approach to the material. As was the case with Marie Antoinette, the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis is one that has inspired any number of questions over the years, starting with the most basic ones of why her parents allowed her to go off, first on dates and then to America, in the first place to how Elvis was able to get away with this seemingly scandalous relationship, even as Jerry Lee Lewis was being publicly crucified for doing essentially the same thing at the same time. Coppola does not really delve into these notions to any great degree and while the lack of conclusion in this regard may frustrate some viewers hoping to get all the details, that is not the kind of film she is making. (Of course, Baz Luhrmann didn’t exactly delve into these issues with any particular fidelity—especially in regards to the age difference between Elvis and Priscilla—so maybe that isn’t such a concern after all.)
Instead, as was the case with that previous biopic, she is less interested in answering these questions than in taking a woman who became an extraordinarily (in)famous and often misunderstood figure at a young age and presenting her through a more immersive form of storytelling that puts us in both her shoes and headspace in order to try to present viewers with a more empathic framework that strives to gives them a real sense of what she was experiencing as during those strange times. The one difference is that this time around, she is a little more scrupulous towards the historical record than she dared to be with Marie Antoinette, presumably in deference to Priscilla herself, who serves as one of the film’s executive producers. As a result, Priscilla make lack a little of the earlier film’s sheer audaciousness but at no time does it feel like the kind of overly sanitized mess that Luhrmann’s Elvis contorted itself into in order to get the all-important song cues from the Presley estate. (Officially denied access to that same catalogue for her film, Coppola’s soundtrack is an undeniably eclectic combination of new music from Phoenix and cleverly chosen tunes, including a climactic needle drop of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” which, if you know the history of that song and Elvis’s relationship to it, feels like an exceptionally wicked jab at the Presley estate.)
Of course, Marie Antoinette had it a little easier in the sense that since no one living could know for certain what those characters actually looked, sounded and acted like in real life, giving the actors a little more leeway in that regard. On the other hand, we have all seen and heard both Elvis and Priscilla to such an extent that anyone playing them is essentially doing a kind of high-wire act in which a single misstep could bring the whole thing down. Here, both Spaeny (who won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival) and Elordi look and sound enough like their characters to mostly pass muster, I suppose, but what they do here goes far beyond merely imitating their predecessors—they both bring their characters to life with such insight and understanding that it is almost as if we are seeing them for the very first time.
Over the course of the film, Spaeny has to both physically and emotionally suggest someone who starts out as an ordinary 14-year-old girl and who grows up a lot in both regards over the course of a 14-year time span and there is not a single moment in that journey where she is ever less than convincing. It is a spectacular performance that is all the better because Coppola’s low-key approach does not allow her the kind of big histrionic moments that look good as Oscar clips but which run the risk of throwing the actual film out of whack—this is a turn so good that you hardly even notice any “acting” at all. As Elvis, Elordi dials way back on the kind of outsized personality traits that those who have played him in the past have tended to embrace, perhaps so as not to risk upstaging Spaeny in their scenes together. However, he does an excellent job as well of suggesting the many facets of Elvis, from the vulnerability he displays in their first meeting (where he only really comes alive banging out “Whole Lotta Shakin Going On” on a piano) to their later days together, where that aw-shucks charm has curdled into something that is both ugly and strangely pitiable.
Coming so soon on the heels of the absurdly overrated Elvis—a film so bad that it made most of Elvis’s actual movies seem tasteful and filled with insight by comparison—it is hard to say whether there will be much of an appetite for another movie about him at this time. And yet, while the memory of Luhrmann’s mess will eventually fade away, I suspect that Priscilla will be the one that ends up standing the test of time, both as a cinematic tackling of the Presley saga (even one in which Presley himself is closer to a supporting character and where none of his songs are actually heard) and as another triumph from one of the most consistently interesting and adventurous filmmakers working today. It is a work that is both gorgeous and thought-provoking in equal measure and while it probably will not be the final word in cinematic explorations into the life of Elvis Presley and those who found themselves inside his circle as his whirlwind story played out in front of the world, it is good enough to actually be just that.