The most powerful aspect of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” premiering in Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is in the title: to focus on Priscilla Presley, née Wagner, formerly Beaulieu, is to show a side of a marriage and of the King himself less familiar than and in some ways different from the romantic popular legend. But Coppola’s film does much more than simply show us the facts of how a fourteen-year-old girl gets to become the girlfriend and then wife of one of the biggest artists of all time. Through subtle detail, a degree of convenient biopic irreality, and a pace that encourages viewers to think beyond first impressions, the film shows a relationship with elements of abuse that is much more complex than the label often suggests.
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At first glance, the film appears to adopt biopic tropes pretty much wholesale, and there are times when we come dangerously close to “Dewey Cox” territory. But there is one major difference: Priscilla isn’t the main character in her own life. When we first find her in an American diner in Wiesbaden, Germany, where her Army father is stationed, she isn’t an as-yet undiscovered talent, she does not harbor any dreams that she will spend her entire life chasing, and she does not have a particularly sparkling personality. She is a normal girl of fourteen, bored in a city she doesn’t know, picked by a friend of Elvis’s to come to one of his parties simply because she is American like him and he misses home.
Coppola’s female characters are often calm girls or women whose outside demeanor can be deceiving, and Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla as a demure and exceptionally easygoing young woman. Her emotions aren’t hard to decipher, as Coppola and director of photography Philippe Le Sourd remain with her at all times, but they are almost always kept under control, expressed in the polite ways becoming of a young woman in the 1950s. She is flustered upon meeting Elvis, being a fan of his like every other American teenage girl, but she does not faint or at all make a fool of herself the way I surely would have.
As Elvis asks to see her again, even making sure to get in her parents’ good books, we begin to think that it may be precisely because of her quiet demeanor that he chooses her. That, and the fact that she is the youngest person in the room at all of his parties. Coppola’s film, which is based on Mrs. Prestley’s autobiography and was produced with her support, does not shy away from the controversy of a 24-year-old man being interested in an underage girl: it is a fact of history, one that even Elvis’ friends draw attention to at the party. Everyone else present at the time, including the teenager’s parents, simply frowns disapprovingly but still considers her lucky to have caught his interest. His behavior when they are together is undeniably predatory, and while some of his seduction tactics will be transparent to most viewers, they clearly aren’t to the young Priscilla. He makes her go up to his room ahead of him, perhaps because he is aware of how bad this might look. Once there, he seeks her empathy by talking about his recently departed mother. Later, he will say she is very mature for her age.
It is frustrating to watch the young girl buy into all of this without anyone trying to protect her. When Elvis returns to the United States, he promises to stay in touch, but two years pass, and she almost gives up on their romance. When he calls her again, they simply pick up where they left off.
Why? Her move to Graceland at 16, where she would live with Elvis, his family, and his entourage of yes-men, allows us to piece together some possible answers as the pair begin to live together like a real couple. Jacob Elordi is a much taller man than the real Elvis was, but what counts the most is his imposing figure compared to that of the film’s tiny star; his more slender build somewhat takes away from the hyper-sexual image of the King, but it does emphasize the teddy bear or “himbo” quality he often displays alone with Priscilla. He looks big yet in some ways vulnerable, a contradiction also at work in the way he treats her: rude, insulting, or even violent one moment, he always immediately apologizes for his behavior. Priscilla’s incredibly placid attitude, then, also seems to stem from her trust in him. Is she naive to accept and believe his apologies, or is she being very mature in doing so, learning to reckon with the human flaws of her famous yet still human lover? This is the question hovering over the entire film — in some ways, then, theirs was a terribly common dynamic.
Coppola gives us all the elements to formulate our own answer, but she does not herself give one. Instead, we watch as Priscilla, equipped with the same information, makes her own decisions. We all know how this story ends (if you don’t, stop reading here): Elvis and Priscilla ultimately got divorced, and the final few sequences of the film show her finally gaining her independence and pursuing her own interests instead of remaining always available to her philandering husband. But while the film’s final shot and the song chosen to play over it may suggest an unambiguous win for female emancipation, also felt in that moment is the terrifying weight of decisions, which we would not sense if this separation had always been an obvious destination — if Elvis had unambiguously been only a bad man, and Priscilla only his victim. [B+]
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