Sofia Coppola makes movies about princesses in castles. From the doomed, mysterious Lisbon sisters locked away from the world in her gobsmackingly great 1999 debut “The Virgin Suicides” to 2020’s undervalued “,” in which Rashida Jones plays lower Manhattan royalty in a Beastie Boys T-shirt, Coppola has always been preoccupied with the isolation of privilege, her characters held hostage by often enviable circumstances.
“Priscilla” is a classic Sofia Coppola story, full of dreamy yearning and disillusionment. Based on Presley’s 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me,” it’s the softer, sadder flipside to Baz Luhrmann’s surprise 2022 summer blockbuster, “.” That was a big, bombastic musical about what the myth of Elvis Presley meant to millions around the world. This is a smaller, more muted movie, stuck at home in an estate that became a prison for our protagonist.
Twenty-five-year-old Cailee Spaeny won Best Actress at this year’s Venice Film Festival for her portrayal of the precocious Priscilla from ages 14 to 28. It’s a remarkable piece of work. I at first assumed they’d cast an actual child for the film’s uncomfortable early scenes set in 1959, when the ninth grader is discovered in a West German diner by one of Elvis’ countless hangers-on.
The initial teenage dream of being courted by the world’s most popular heartthrob is ecstatic, with Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” soaring on the soundtrack like a lovestruck symphony as Spaeny glides down her high school hallway. It’s painfully obvious to all of us in the audience just how sketchy this is — a grown man going out with a little girl — but Coppola gives Priscilla’s perspective its due.
Coppola has such a strong sense for individual scenes, it’s frustrating when they don’t flow into each other. The last third of “Priscilla” gets especially choppy, hitting the biopic doldrums during Elvis’ post-comeback Las Vegas decline. Priscilla’s affair with her karate instructor is coyly hinted at but never dramatized, and her harrowing account of being raped by her husband in his hotel room is weirdly truncated. The rhythm is really off during the last half-hour.
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Sofia Coppola turns her lens on an American icon: Priscilla PresleySofia Coppola learned a long time ago that in order to have full creative freedom, she'd have to to get creative with budgets and timelines. Though to look at her latest film, “Priscilla,” a continent and decade-spanning portrait of Priscilla Presley's life with Elvis, you wouldn't know that it was shot in 30 days, mainly in Toronto.
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