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.

Elordi would appear to be performing at a major disadvantage, playing Elvis so soon after Austin Butler embodied the singer with impressive electricity and stage presence. Instead, his Elvis feeling like a charismatic imitation is just about perfect for the role as conceived here, both larger-than-life in aura and sorta underwhelming in the day-to-day. (In one of the movie’s saddeset/funniest interludes, Elvis decides to rebrand as a pseudo-intellectual, immersing himself in philosophy tomes, uniting Priscilla and the unseen Parker in disgust. (Naturally, it’s only Parker’s that catches Elvis’s attention.) Throughout these bits and pieces of odd domestic life, Spaeny, is conducting a small miracle. She initially plays a 14-year-old girl from the vantage of her mid-twenties, and with such conviction that when we see an older Priscilla (one who is closer to Spaney’s real-life age), it provokes a jolt of surprise.

It’s harder to be surprised by the movie as a whole, because it is so well-suited to Coppola’s sensibilities and preoccupations; from its first shot of a teenage girl’s painted toes feeling out the shaggy carpet beneath them, we are in familiar territory. In that sense (among others), it makes a splendid double-A-side to the Luhrmann film, which plays much as you’d expect a Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic to play while fully satisfying on those terms. Though Coppola may be singing a familiar song, it rings with clarity and purpose, and unlike most biopics, it does not outstay its welcome.

As far as the actual music: Coppola does not use any of the famous Presley songs in her film, though it is, like so much of her filmography, much enhanced by her soundtrack choices. At one point, when Priscilla and Elvis are still in Germany, “Crimson and Clover” plays over one of their meetings, then carries over to the next day, as Priscilla loses herself in private reverie, walking down her school hallway. The song would not actually be released for another decade, but Coppola is communicating the kind of feeling that can simulate a leap forward in time, whether real or imagined. A Dolly Parton song scores a crucial moment late in the film, also anachronistic but now less so. Priscilla is catching up; this time, the real-life debut of the song is only a year or two away.

The part of Priscilla’s life shown in the film – the waiting, the isolation, the prison of male perceptions and expectations of femininity – could easily resemble hell. With her trademark acuity, Coppola finds moments of beauty, too: a roller-rink glow, the nostalgic edges of early home movies, the girl-world rituals like toenail-painting and eyelash application. It’s both seductive and terribly sad. Most people grow out of adolescence whether they want to or not. In Priscilla, the heroine has to leave by choice.

Director: Sofia Coppola
Writer: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Domińczyk, Ari Cohen
Release Date: October 6, 2023 (New York Film Festival); November 3, 2023 (theaters)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.