Sofia Coppola Returns to the Gilded Cage with the Elvis-Adjacent Priscilla
If Sofia Coppola specializes in depicting young and feminine life from the inside of a gilded cage, Priscilla features her most gilded cage since Marie Antoinette. Is Graceland, the Memphis home of Elvis Presley, our American Versailles? At least Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is eventually whisked there by choice, though perhaps it amounts to a similar parental neglect for her well-being. When Priscilla, at the tender age of 14, is spotted at an American military diner in Germany and invited to a party at Presley’s home, her parents hesitate to grant their permission. But in the film’s telling, they’re more concerned by the details of general propriety, their reluctance eased by assuring phone calls about how Priscilla will be chaperoned and Mr. Presley is on the up-and-up. They may be missing the forest for the trees.
Priscilla, though, is enthralled. She’s sleepwalking through her freshman year of high school in an unfamiliar place, and the attentions of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) flatter her, make her feel grown up. Elvis towers over this little girl – the height difference between the two actors, with Elordi standing nearly half a foot taller than the real Presley, perfectly exaggerates and distends the physical distance between them, even as they grow close. Then Elvis’s military service ends, and he returns to his recording career, promising to keep calling. Priscilla holds out hope, but the time between 1960 and mid-1962 passes in a blur – until Elvis calls her for a visit and, shortly thereafter, invites her to stay for good. Her parents, again, relent: so long as she finishes school.
Though older, Priscilla is still just a teenager at this point – she attends Catholic school near Graceland to receive her high school diploma. She and Elvis do not marry, or sleep together. (The source material is Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, adapted by Coppola.) Indeed, more casual students of Elvis lore may wonder if they’ve missed the marriage entirely, if it has been lost in the fluid slipstream of time that Coppola depicts. Nope: He proposed in 1966, and they married in 1967, nearly a decade after their first meeting, and it is shown on screen. According to Priscilla, this meant an eight-year wait for wedding-night sex. And according to Priscilla, this wasn’t based on any reluctance from Priscilla herself, who Coppola and Spaeny depict as ready by the time she reaches Graceland. Instead, they share a bed (and can do “other things,” Elvis makes clear) without sharing other’s bodies, leaving Priscilla arrested at a young age – something it’s implied that Elvis very much wanted. “Stay the way you are now,” he tells her at a time that his attention should inspire worry, rather than a swoon.
The resulting relationship, and eventually marriage, is at once deeply intimate, as the two nuzzle in bed together for days, and removed, as Priscilla is not exactly welcomed into Presley’s fold. Large swaths of his life, like his adventures in Hollywood, remain shielded from her gaze. Colonel Tom Parker, the notorious manager so memorably portrayed by Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis, is spoken of, never seen. Elvis’s friends are a blurred-together crew of joshing boy-men. Their child, Lisa Marie, is born into her own remove from this strange imitation of a family. Priscilla is in many ways Elvis’s dress-up doll, and like a lot of people, she grows out of doll play. Elvis prefers her in a kind of stasis.