It’s 1959 and 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is stuck on an army base in West Germany. She is the epitome of what we imagine a 1950s teenager to be. She sits at a diner countertop, clean-faced with a ponytail, wearing a light pink sweater, and sucking down a Coca-Cola while she does her homework.
She’s also the epitome of teenage boredom. So, when she’s invited to a party at none other than Elvis Presley’s (Jacob Elordi) house, she jumps at the chance. Her parents, however, are less than thrilled. Priscilla can’t believe they could be so unfair. “There’s nothing to do here,” she says in a soft, but sullen tone, before she dutifully storms off to her room.
Whether it be “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” or even “The Beguiled,” Sofia Coppola has always excelled at a specific type of teenage ennui. She has an eye for that languid sort of angst that arises at some point in a typical teen girl’s life, when she would literally rather be anywhere else than where she is right at that moment in time.
But Priscilla Beaulieu – who later became Priscilla Presley – never really got to be a typical teenage girl. Coppola’s new film “Priscilla” covers the span of their courtship and marriage, with a particular emphasis on the years Priscilla spent at Graceland. With her parents’ permission, she moved to Elvis’s legendary home when she was about 17 and married the rock star (10 years her senior) at the ripe old age of 21.
Even though Priscilla experienced something far from typical teenage years, Coppola (who wrote the screenplay based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 biography “Elvis and Me”) uses the contrast between Priscilla’s demeanor and the life she is thrust into to constantly remind us that she is just that. “Priscilla” is a story where all the dreaminess of idealized teen romance butts up against the bleaker reality of the situation. Coppola tells that story with real sensitivity, never trivializing Priscilla’s feelings and employing teenage imagery to heighten just how much of that experience she lost out on.
While attending one of Elvis’s parties, Priscilla receives the first of many suggestions. Why don’t you go on upstairs and wait for me, Elvis asks her, prodding her to leave the rollicking party below to wait on pins and needles in the darkness of his bedroom upstairs. Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship is characterized by these suggestions that aren’t really suggestions at all.
When Priscilla starts having trouble staying awake in class due to long nights spent with the most famous man in the world, he slips her a pill. If you’re tired in class tomorrow, you can take this, he says with no malice, just matter of fact – it’ll help you stay awake. These suggestions eventually lead to him picking what she wears, what color her hair should be, what her makeup should look like – even what she should read (when Olivia Rodrigo sang, “I read all of your self help books so you’d think that I was smart,” she didn’t know how right she was).
So, the early version of Priscilla Presely as we know her is one that is curated by her image-obsessed husband. We think of grooming or abuse as something that is grandiose, but the version Coppola brings to life is so effective because of how normal it all seems. When Elvis comes to pick Priscilla up and have a sit down with her father (Ari Cohen), she and her mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) wait in the kitchen while the men talk. Mother nudges daughter with a coy smile, as if to say, “Can you believe Elvis is sitting on our couch? And look how handsome and polite he is!” In “Priscilla” the film, her parents seem to think the whole thing is a phase – what’s the harm in letting her live out this teenage fantasy for a short while? But they underestimate the strength of teenage tenacity and feeling, particularly when those feelings are returned by someone with such immense power.
Priscilla is still a teenager when she moves to Graceland, which serves as a gilded cage and removes any chance of normalcy in the most formative years of her life. Coppola – along with an incredible team that includes cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, production designer Tamara Deverell and costume designer Stacey Battat – gives us all the iconography of teenagerdom, but none of the actual magic. Priscilla doodles “Elvis” all over her notebooks, she twirls a telephone cord around her finger as she talks to him. But she spends most of her time alone. Elvis gives her a puppy to keep her company while he’s away, but when she plays with the dog on the lawn, she’s told to get inside and stop making a spectacle of herself. She can’t bring any friends home after school. She can’t get an afterschool job – Elvis doesn’t like women that are too career-minded. She can’t do anything, really, but drift around the house, waiting for him to come home. She’s bored. There’s nothing to do here.
As Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny’s performance lives in her reactions. She walks through the house aimlessly like a lost little girl, drawn to Elvis like a moth to a flame whenever he’s around. During a dinner scene, the camera lingers on her as she tries to keep up with the raucous conversations of people much older and more worldly than she is. Elvis makes a crack about large women, and she leans back from the table and stops eating. Her eyes dart around, she laughs a little too late at a joke, she starts to say something and then stops. She is usually alone and almost always unsure. The height difference between Elordi and Spaeny (6’5” and 5’1” respectively) helps create the sense that Elvis is constantly looming over Priscilla, even in his sweet moments.
And there are sweet moments. Those are the moments that a teenager daydreams about, the moments where the biggest rock star in the world only has eyes for you. But as the movie and the marriage goes on, Priscilla starts to come into her own, her wide eyes becoming a bit sharper. This change is reflected in her costumes, as she starts to seem like a woman with her own sense of style rather than a little girl dressed up like a doll. It’s a visual representation of someone coming to grips with her teenage years, or lack thereof, and what she went through. The film’s final needledrop captures that feeling precisely, a perfect mixture of the power that comes with moving on and the bittersweet promise of what once was.