Priscilla Review: Sofia Coppola’s Unexpectedly Tasteful Rendering of American Myth

After the Southern Gothic thriller elements of 2017’s The Beguiled and the broad rom-com antics of 2020’s On the Rocks, which saw Sofia Coppola departing slightly from the aesthetic territory that she’d staked so forcefully in her earlier work, Priscilla finds the filmmaker firmly back in her wheelhouse. Based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 biography Elvis and Me, Coppola’s latest is another impossibly photogenic tale of fame, solitude, material wealth, and female desire in a world that often contrives to deny its existence.

Spanning 14 years in the life of Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), from her meeting Elvis (Jacob Elordi), the rock ‘n’ roll heartthrob she idolized near the German army base where he was stationed (when he was 24 and she was just 14), to her leaving their lavish Memphis home after the dissolution of their marriage, this is the most ambitious film Coppola has made to date. Unfortunately, its larger scope proves to be something of a hindrance. While her previous efforts tended to focus on just a few places or a forcibly truncated amount of time, lending even the most dramatic incidents an allusive quality and mirroring the sense of dislocation experienced by the characters, Priscilla’s expanded canvas often obscures its emotional subtleties.

The film is at its most effective in its early stages, as the tender strangeness of Elvis and Priscilla’s courtship is observed with an attentive, non-judgmental eye. Navigating curfews, chaperones, paparazzi, and the yawning 10-year age gap between them, the pair develop an intimacy that’s resilient to external pressures, even as it believably morphs into codependency.

Elordi’s enigmatic performance is particularly impressive, making the icon appear alternately wounded, arrogant, and bewildered. But as Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship progresses and the film’s pace picks up, the emotional through line is somewhat lost. For a filmmaker once unafraid to gaze at a sports car circling an empty track or a softly lit body part in repose for several minutes, it’s a little surprising how economically Coppola moves from one story beat to the next, rarely dwelling on the gauzy sensuality and indulgent ennui that she excels at conveying.

One Coppola film that does share Priscilla’s relatively sprawling chronology and which makes for a particularly useful comparison is Marie Antoinette, another biopic of a famous young wife struggling with life in the public eye (and with her husband’s low sex drive). While her 2006 tour de force conspicuously rejected historical fidelity in order to explore Marie Antoinette’s perspective in all its giddy splendor and adolescent delusion, no such postmodern joie de vivre is evident here, besides the occasional anachronistic soundtrack cue. The events portrayed (and, perhaps, the involvement of the real-life Priscilla in production) seem to have demanded a higher degree of accuracy and objectivity, which places excessive strain on the film.

It doesn’t help that the period has been overrepresented in media. Firmly established as a kind of foundational myth for American pop culture, this slice of mid-20th-century life necessarily brings with it some heavy baggage that has to be reckoned with on screen, in one way or another. Compared to Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, two recent big swings that, for all their flaws, sought actively to distill the era’s iconography into one of its essential constituents—kinetic bravura and male abuses of power, respectively—Priscilla seems content to reproduce its details tastefully, with minimal editorializing.

The muted color palette of Philippe Le Sourd’s cinematography matches the film’s relatively even-handed depiction of this chapter in Priscilla’s life, with romance, domestic violence, and prescription drug use all shown in a similarly matter-of-fact way. As admirably authentic and sensitive as her vision might be, Coppola’s failure to do anything novel with this worn-out milieu, either visually or thematically, can make the whole affair feel a little stifling after a while.

Of course, enjoying the heady potency of celebrity glamour from a slight remove has been one of Coppola’s trademarks for most of her career. And while that might have made sense for the anecdotal, semi-autobiographical premises of Lost in Translation or Somewhere, it seems like a rather counterintuitive way of handling the source material here. With the film stranded in a middle ground between lived-in specificity and euphoric, widescreen spectacle, the mostly mundane personal tribulations of Priscilla and her megastar lover are never fully absorbing.

Toward the end of the film, as her failing marriage approaches the point of no return, Priscilla gathers her infant daughter, Lisa-Marie, alongside Elvis for a cozy domestic photoshoot for a magazine. The family poses expertly and Coppola’s camera hovers around the photographer’s position, a clever framing that emphasizes the boundaries between public-facing perfection and the messiness of private reality, while also hinting at the deceptive fluidity of those boundaries.

Encapsulating the paradox of Coppola’s oeuvre, this symbolism emerges from her meticulously curated mise-en-scène, just as her characters often find meaning in the insular fantasy worlds they’re obliged to cultivate and occupy. It’s fitting, then, that it’s her most concerted effort to tell someone else’s story that ends up feeling so empty, as Priscilla’s delicate mystique struggles to free itself from an oppressive mood board imposed from without by six decades of history.