It is impossible to write about Sofia Coppola in 2023 without mention of the microblogging sphere that her early work, with all its wistful poetic value, has spawned. The tables have turned, the snake is chewing on its own tail, etc., and so we now have to contend with lukewarm bites of filmic discourse that once sufficed as posts. Wow, did you know that Elvis was a paedo! This simple fact is not enough to sustain the momentum of a feature-length film. Priscilla Presley’s story is exciting to read in her own words, but it is no fun to encroach upon as a visual voyeur. Coppola, caught in a craze for women’s history, confuses new insight with narrative interest. Priscilla is a character study of a woman to whom things happen.
The film falters as it fails to establish any true connection with Priscilla’s world. Coppola’s style usually holds because she is good at capturing the built environments of bored young girls, often with a sense of originality that exceeds the viewer’s expectations. The Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides live in suburban Michigan in the ‘70s but are trapped within bedrooms that look like fin-de-siecle Catholic brothels, a fact that is never explained on film. Lost in Translation plonks Scarlett Johansson’s character into a version of urban Japan that is just as confusing for the audience as it is for her. Marie Antoinette works because the historicity of its subject leaves plenty of room for imagination.
Meanwhile, we know what Graceland will look like before Priscilla ever arrives, and it is set out exactly the way we imagine it. Her hoard of Elvis ephemera is not used to any narrative effect and will not be unfamiliar to the viewer with even the most tenuous 1950s connection. The film trudges through a predictable sequence of bedrooms and classrooms and mansions. No surprises. Coppola cloaks most of her interiors with an oppressive layer of dust and silence (another fun fact - did you know that being Elvis’s teenage girlfriend was actually very boring?). With some invention and intention, this starkness could have been a way to subvert the kitsch myth of midcentury pop; instead, Priscilla joins the status quo, traipsing along with a million-and-one serious post-2000s biopics in a shared grey mire. The exceptions are Elvis’s red boudoir (still lit low, so as to avoid any possible association with Ken Russell) and one shot of a moonlit Las Vegas street that looks like something out of 1950s Cinemascope.
[Faye Dunaway poses (maybe) for Terry O’Neill’s famous Oscars Ennui 1977. Coppola has plucked bits from this from the very beginning but now perhaps misses its major point. The beauty is in what we do not see.]
I think Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny were cast well as a twisted version of Elvis and Priscilla, one squashed and the other stretched. This exaggeration brings to mind the early-tens vogue for dark adult fairytale adaptations. There must be some mythologising in a biopic, and this is it. That Priscilla was slightly shorter and Elvis slightly taller. This film, although intended as a feminist correction, will never truly exist within the Elvis canon in the way that Mommie Dearest (a masterpiece, in its unhingedness, of all abuse biopics) has redefined the historical figure of Joan Crawford. The height difference exists not as an exercise of style but only to magnify the Paedogeddon-ing. It is disconcerting to see the two in bed together, but not as disconcerting as it is to see them magicked into a new socially-distanced universe of Dogme 95 mumblecore, one mostly too nervous to speak and the other barely enunciating from behind a blurred wall of stardom. Priscilla really does desire Elvis, who is playing coy - but we learn of this only through little outbursts that seem to have been added to the screenplay as a matter of emergency.
The wall breaks only momentarily, when Priscilla screams at Elvis in a fit of hysteria that rumoured rival Ann-Margret should leave him alone and go back to Sweden. This, in a screenplay built mostly on ennui, stands out as a no-wire-hangers-ever, I-am-Myra-Breckinridge-whom-no-man-will-ever-possess crowning moment of camp. It is all the more camp because it connects directly to the established camp superstructure, of which Ann-Margret is a major part. Nobody laughed at it at my screening, because the innate American-ness of Ann-Margret is no longer part of the shared public consciousness, at least not in London.
Priscilla’s divorce goes through and she drives away from Graceland to Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, a bit of complexity that is both belated and far too obvious.