‘Priscilla’ Review: A Star Is Born In Sofia Coppola’s Examination Of An Iconic Relationship
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla. Courtesy of A24.
“She looks so young,” says an onlooker at a gathering in the opening minutes of Priscilla. And they’re right; she does look incredibly young — just one way Sofia Coppola has expertly crafted a multi-faceted look into the lives of some of the most recognizable American figures, such a deep look into a part of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s lives that lost Coppola access to the rights to use Elvis’ music. Almost a contradiction to Baz Luhrmann's 2022 film, Elvis (more like Elvis!), Priscilla, the latest from the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette filmmaker, wastes no time to get to the meat — and heart — of its story.
Jacob Elordi & Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla. Courtesy of A24.
It’s Germany, 1959, and a young girl sits in a diner sipping a Coke when a man approaches her — “Do you like Elvis Presley?” He asks. “Sure, who doesn’t?” She replies. It’s here that we recognize a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) — soon to be Presley — and, after following her to a party, meet the biggest star in the world — Elvis Presley (played here by Jacob Elordi). “You look like a baby,” he soon remarks, and, on all accounts, he’s right. Coppola cast her two leads to create a visual disparity between the two to highlight their age gap (when they met, Priscilla was 14 and Elvis was 24), a choice that’s more effective than just telling us, though there’s a fair amount of that, too. The 6’4 Elordi towers over the 5’1 Spaeny, coming off as an almost intimidating figure when standing in front of this quiet girl who you can picture in the back row of a math class.
Soon after, however, Elvis returns home from Germany, and, with a fair amount of persistent pleading, Priscilla joins him — totally safe to send your 17-year-old to live with Elvis Presley, right? — and we find ourselves in Graceland… You know the rest… We truly take our time learning the ins-and-outs of this relationship, as it is the film’s central and sole focus, rightly so, as the nuances and intricacies of the dynamic between Elvis and Priscilla becomes a much more interesting subject without the spectacle and Lights! Camera! Action! lens of it all that we’ve previously examined it under.
We don’t really get to know Priscilla outside of her relationship with Elvis, and for good reason. The point in doing this — in not letting us get an understanding of who Priscilla is as an individual, to be clear — is to, again, highlight the fact that Priscilla never had the chance to figure out who she was on her own, a point that the film packs with a sharp one-two punch. With any other film, you see, there’d be some sort of valid criticism in this — let us understand characters as people to create two equally right sides of an argument (to create drama, as David Fincher would tell you) — but in this case, there is none, because, to Coppola and Spaeny’s credit, Priscilla Presley is intimately portrayed as a three-dimensional, real person, a person whose life was defined by another’s for such a long time.
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla. Courtesy of A24.
Speaking of Spaeny, however, she shines in her first leading role, effortlessly and effectively portraying Priscilla from a shy, quiet 14-year-old to a 17-year-old with one eye on school and the other on fame, and a (rightfully) frustrated 28-year-old without once feeling out of place. She’s aided by the outstanding makeup and hairstyling work that help us easily differentiate between the film’s different eras for its characters, not to mention the great work they do with Elordi’s Elvis. A major change from his sweet, naive supporting turn in this year’s Saltburn, Jacob Elordi portrays the Elvis Presley that Baz Luhrmann was too scared to show. He doesn’t hold back, going from a playful doting husband to a menacing — no — downright scary man with the snap of a finger. He’s worked hard this year to show he’s more than just the tall jock on Euphoria (or god forbid that one guy from those three horrendous Netflix original The Kissing Booth films).
Since her debut with The Virgin Suicides in 1999, Sofia Coppola has defined her career about the coming-of-age of young women. She’s stayed in the headspace so long that — as she admitted in a recent New York Times profile — she’s slightly surprised that it’s been 25 years since Virgin Suicides. In the same headspace, though, Priscilla tackles similar, albeit different themes, doing so in a manner that might just create Sofia Coppola’s most intimate film to date, creating a lived-in world (great cinematography helps!) and characters that feel familliarly distant, as if we’re grasping at a forbidden fruit, seeing something we’re not supposed to, even though, in this case, we are. She tackles the topics and themes with ease, using music, sets, and even different film stocks to culminate in a soft, devastatingly beautiful finale with one of the most perfect song choices possible.
Priscilla is now playing in LA & NY theaters from A24. It expands on November 3.
This review was made possible thanks to our friends at A24 who invited us to an early screening of Priscilla for review.
