Jonah Naplan   November 5, 2023

“Priscilla” is not a movie about Priscilla Presley. Not really. Nor, for that matter, is it a movie about Elvis. (And if you want to see one about him, there are so many other places you can look to satisfy that desire elsewhere). It is a movie about the tumultuous relationship between the two, a bond that is itself a character, and one that assumes a protagonist role for much of the runtime. Like a good protagonist, it moves the story forward, its actions build the theme, and it has an arc that completes its cycle by the end. “Priscilla” needs a metaphor as a protagonist because its real characters are not nearly interesting enough to adhere into anything memorable. There is so much good in “Priscilla,” but not nearly enough great.

Director Sofia Coppola, whose work often reflects the tense feeling of being held captive—either against a character’s will, or because they feel morally obligated to keep their mouth shut, or both—closely inspects Elvis and Priscilla as human beings, but not so much that we feel at all shaken when the movie’s over or as though we’ve traveled down a new avenue into the life of the King of Rock and Roll, witnessing a side of his persona previously obscured by the media. If you come to “Priscilla” aching to see even a smidgeon more of what Baz Luhrmann’s biopic portrayed, you will more than likely walk away disappointed. This is, among other things, a humanity study, but not a very effective one.

Its first scenes introduce a young (14 year old!) Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) to The King, who, at the time—1959—was enlisted in the U.S. Army and stationed in Germany. Priscilla herself was a military girl, but her ambitious heart was prone to venture beyond what her parents expected from her. These moments are based wholesale on accounts from the real Priscilla Presley, as written in her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, but they seem to be utterly lacking the charm or stakes needed to make them emotionally moving. And that’s an issue the script will continue to face as it moves into its latter portions, wallowing in unearned sentiment that doesn’t do much to advance individual characters or ideas, resolving on notes unfulfilling and ambiguous.

Elvis is played by “The Kissing Booth” trilogy star, Jacob Elordi, a six-foot-five Australian whose performance is difficult to truly admire after considering what Austin Butler did with the same character only a year ago. Then again, these two actors are playing entirely different facets of Elvis, so much so that they may as well be regarded as two different characters. Showman Elvis is never portrayed in full; in the single moment that glimpses one of his several Vegas shows, he’s briefly depicted from behind, before exiting the borders of the frame. Instead, Coppola focuses on the husband that Priscilla knew, and her regular cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd’s many close-ups hammer home the ostensibility to make a point of the movie’s intimacy.

Both lead actors are respectable, and much of “Priscilla” feels like a chamber piece between two lovers coming to terms with what their troubled love actually means in a world yearning and destined to tear them apart. But Spaeny feels especially betrayed by such a thinly-written character, never exactly let off her leash to explore deeper routes into the woman who, perhaps, was perfectly molded by Elvis to be his ideal wife. Much has already been written—by experts, by critics, and by the late Lisa Marie Presley—about how accurately or inaccurately Elvis is portrayed in the film, and that he’s wrongly depicted as a groomer, a manipulator and, in a sense, a vociferous captor. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that “Priscilla” can’t seem to decide whether it thinks Elvis is a good or bad guy, constantly shifting the mood from gentle to aggressive, rhyming with his behavior in any given moment.

Scenes of Elvis throwing chairs at the wall, narrowly avoiding Priscilla’s head, are juxtaposed beside the couple lounging in bed, discussing such matters typically considered too flatulent to be serious. We feel the strain to justify the movie on enigmatic terms, but the stereotypes it follows are outmoded. Luckily, the story is told in a visually pleasing way; a boxy, square ratio that believably captures the time period with enough vigor and sweetness, an aesthetic design choice that is exclusively Coppola’s own. Some of her choices to linger on a certain object, pan across a room thoughtfully, or drop key lines of dialogue to justify a decision a character will make later on are admirable.

Coppola does not shy away from depicting Elvis’s fascination with film acting—Presley talks vividly about his fondness for “On the Waterfront,” wanting to return to America to pursue a career in tune with Marlon Brando and James Dean. When the two realize that their dreams cannot be achieved in full, they both start to reach for the pills and experiment with LSD on sugar cubes. One of the film’s most haunting scenes comes in the form of a trip sequence that is certainly one of the more reliable accounts of psychedelia in a recent movie. But even then, the moment is not foregrounded by themes that were fully developed in the hour prior.

Coppola’s past work, which includes “Lost in Translation” and “The Beguiled,” explore many of the same themes as “Priscilla” in different ways. But all of them depict that feeling of being trapped in a cage—here Priscilla is Elvis’s prisoner, and his efforts, the movie posits, to squander her potential, by rendering her a stereotypical housewife without a real job and a tight leash that restricts her from rarely leaving the grounds of Graceland, are wickedly vile. But the problem there is that the movie doesn’t go the extra mile to let us sit with Priscilla during this period, and instead throws up its hands and has Spaeny wander from room to room, in various guises of melancholy, looking empty; not because that’s how the character is feeling but because Spaeny isn’t given any other modicum of inflection to express. As Elvis is off, doing who knows what, Priscilla takes center-stage, ruminating through the periphery, making us wonder what she’s wondering, which defeats the whole point.

Now playing in theaters.