Movie Review: 'Priscilla'

Priscilla (2023)

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Written by Sofia Coppola

Starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elrond

Release Date 11-03-2023

Published 11-04-2023

Sofia Coppola is one of the best directors on the planet. She has a distinctive style, a mastery of tone, and the patience required to tell stories in a way only she can. A Sofia Coppola movie will not be mistaken for another director. Coppola's style is hypnotic and gorgeous. Her patient approach to allowing her characters to reveal themselves via action rather than clumsy dialogue is almost unmatched. There is no bombast, no major theatrics, and a distinct lack of commerciality. It's a kind of direction that simply speaks to me and how I enjoy experiencing a movie.

Priscilla is a unique challenge for Sofia Coppola. She's used to being the complete master of her narrative. Here however, she has a template, a kind of history that requires a fealty to the memory of generations. The life of Elvis Presley is among the most well-known and well-documented in human history, matched only perhaps, by the life of Marilyn Monroe. People have particular expectations of a movie that is going to depict even a fraction of that life. Priscilla, obviously, isn't about Elvis but by his design, her life is defined in many ways by him.

We are entirely in Priscilla's space in Priscilla but because Elvis was a controlling man, a man unaware that he is an abuser, few abusers see themselves as they are, Priscilla has no life that isn't defined by his wants, his desires, and his schedule. And that's the hallmark of this story. As much as Priscilla Presley doesn't want to demonize her ex-husband and the father of her child, his actions speak for themselves in how he isolated a young woman from her support system and used emotional and financial abuse tactics to keep Priscilla under control.

There is a theory among hardcore conservatives about marrying very young woman with the goal of training them to be obedient wives. Whether Elvis knew he was doing that or not, is not clear but that's what he ends up going for. He meets Priscilla when she is 14 years old and sets about grooming her to be his obedient, loving wife. He takes control of her by manipulating her parents and slowly but surely prying Priscilla from her family. With his star power and the promise of his Christian faith, Elvis takes advantage of Priscilla's parents and their desire to make their daughter happy. I think Priscilla's parents should never have let their teen daughter get this close to a man so much older than her but that doesn't really matter now.

The hallmark of Elvis and Priscilla's relationship isn't sexual desire but rather, the desire by Elvis to have a woman that he can control and mold into a mother figure, servant, therapist and wife. Their relationship prior to marriage borders on platonic and this is a weird strain of Christian conservatism that Elvis grew up with. The woman you marry isn't a sexual being with sexual desires or drives of their own. They are servants, they serve their husbands. Other women, loose women, the women you don't marry, those are the women you have wild sexual escapades with.

The marriage is kept holy with sex only after marriage and only for procreation while we hypocritically overlook the notion of being faithful to one's spouse. Elvis cheated and lied about it. He strayed throughout his marriage while Priscilla lived a life of cloistered boredom, privilege is her only award. She was kept at Graceland, isolated from the world, unable to have a life of her own or friends of her own. She is at Elvis's beckoned call at all times. She's a sounding board but only insofar as she listens and offers no opinion. It's really gross behavior because it's entirely abusive but not in a way that many will recognize it.

Coppola's direction documents these various abuses in an objective fashion. She doesn't go out of her way to judge Elvis with the narrative. Rather, Coppola invites us to observe Priscilla's life and make up our mind how we feel about how she was treated. If you don't recognize Elvis's behavior as abusive, you need to change the way you view personal relationships. Isolating someone from their support system, preventing them from making other connections in life through friendships, these are the tactics of an abuser. Priscilla has none of her own money, no way to simply leave if she wants to, and though she does have her parents, she has a fear of their judgment to keep her from wanting to give up on her relationship. Making someone feel ashamed is another way abusers can control the behavior of the people they abuse.

There is one scene in particular where Elvis uses an emotionally abusive tactic that has only gained mainstream attention recently. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender. There is a scene where Elvis has clearly wronged Priscilla and he runs through this exact scenario, denying he'd done anything wrong, attacking her her for being upset with him, and then making himself out to be the victim and her the one who has offended him. Here again, Coppola makes no attempt to tell us this, we just see the scene play out and whether you recognize this tactic of abuse or not, it's entirely up to you, Coppola is not here to stack the deck.

The hypnotic, trance-like power of Coppola's direction is less prominent in Priscilla and that is likely due to having to be faithful to history and to her subject who was heavily involved in the production of the movie. But that doesn't mean that it's entirely absent from the film. When Priscilla is alone and wandering aimlessly around the opulence of Graceland, that beautiful, hazy, trance-like vibe settles on the movie and underlines the lonely, sad, state of Priscilla's life being at the mercy of a man who may not be a bad person but is nonetheless, an active abuser who neglects her needs in favor of his own at all times.

On top of the exceptional direction of Sofia Coppola, we have a pair of incredible performances at the center of the film in Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elrond as Elvis. Spaeny's vocal performance is a standout as she captures the girlish, anxious, breathy voice of Priscilla Presley beautifully. That small squeak of a voice gains more power over the course of the movie and it's part of the character journey. When Priscilla breaks through and screams it has extra power behind it because she rarely speaks above a breathy whisper. It also has more impact as she becomes a fully formed woman who can speak up for herself. It's so seemingly simple but it's still so powerful.

As for Elrond, his power comes in the emptiness he brings to the core of Elvis. Elvis is desperate to have a personality, he's desperate to express himself but he too has been abused and controlled by others and when he becomes untethered from the control of others, he becomes even more lost, longing and sad. It's not hard to see how Colonel Tom Parker, who is not seen in this movie, could have taken advantage of Elvis' simple nature, his desperate need to please, his desire to have people make decisions for him while he parties with his friends and feeds his various desires in full.

There is a subtle way in which Coppola films Elvis from Priscilla's perspective. He towers over her, his size making her look even younger and more childlike than she is. It's as if, when Priscilla is on screen with Elvis that she is edging herself into the frame. She's in focus, she's the center of the scene and we remain on her face, at a reasonable distance but Elvis seems to take up more of the frame, even as his face, and upper body are just out of the center. It's a subtle choice but an ingenious one that keeps us at a distance from Elvis and fully in the sphere of Priscilla, even as his presence is the looming one.

Priscilla is among the best movies of 2023. It's a quietly assured masterpiece of tone and mood. The needle drops are insanely great, even as the music of Elvis Presley himself is not featured. There are so many incredible pieces of perioud and near period music that I can't pick a favorite. It's all so very good and all so perfect to the pitch and tone that Coppola is building all throughout Priscilla. If Coppola doesn't earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, the awards system is irreparably broken.

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