For all those (like me) who found Baz Luhrman’s Elvis to be grossly overcooked, may I offer an alternative: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. It would be difficult to find a filmmaker whose style is more opposed to Luhrman than Coppola. Where the Australian director drenches his films in high-octane romanticism, Coppola’s church mouse solemnity lacks any and all sentimentality. It isn’t actually, but it’s hard not to read Priscilla as a direct response to Elvis. Where last year’s film was a marathon dedicated to the king of rock n’ roll, Priscilla is a meditative document of the prison of fame and fortune. This is well-trod territory for Coppola, whose protagonists are often women entrapped by the privilege that surrounds them. It’s a prickly point-of-view, easy to criticize, but her films work best when she’s least apologetic about it.

Based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Elvis and Me, the film wades into the ickiness of Elvis courting a high school freshman, but doesn’t condescend to us by declaring to us how bad that is. If anything the film appears to have a lot of admiration for Priscilla’s forthright decision-making at such a young age, all while mourning the inevitable trap that she finds herself ensnared in. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla. It’s a remarkable performance of transformation, playing her from age fourteen to thirty-two. The costuming and hair styling are key here, but Spaeny’s performance – her depiction of spiritual development, confidence of body language – is a triumph, capturing first the honeyed innocence of entranced youth, before the heartbreaking realizations of adulthood. It is a true coming-of-age performance unlike any I’ve seen.

When we meet Priscilla, she’s a fourteen-year-old American girl living in West Germany. Her stepfather (Ari Cohen) is an Air Force captain stationed overseas. There’s not much for the young girl to do in Germany, except go to school and visit the local soda jerk, drinking milkshakes and listening to American music on the jukebox. One day she’s approached by a man named Terry West (Luke Humphrey), who succinctly and directly states that he’s friends with Elvis Presley, who is currently serving and is stationed nearby. Would she like to come over and meet him? This scene is a Coppola masterclass; it unfolds calmly and without event, but the red flags quickly arise. Who is this Terry West? And why is Elvis – perhaps the most famous man in the world – using him to attract high schoolers for companionship.

Priscilla’s mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) doesn’t like the sound of it, while her stepfather outright refuses. But eventually, like always, the superstar gets what he wants, and Priscilla finds herself in the living room of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). Elvis is sweet, respectful, open about grieving the death of his beloved mother. He shares his vulnerabilities, earns Priscilla’s trust, but more importantly, he convinces Priscilla that she’s earned his. Elvis becomes more aggressive in his courtship, not only of her but of her parents, seducing them with perfect military manners and celebrity charm. Eventually she’s living with him in Graceland, a secret girlfriend hidden from fans who might hate her existence. By the time they finally do get married, Elvis has  transformed from the bereaved boy she met in Germany, and is now a pill-popping maniac who wants to control every aspect of Priscilla’s life.

It is telling that in both Elvis and Priscilla, the character of Elvis seldom speaks for himself. Elvis is basically the story of Tom Hanks’s machiavellian Colonel, a clever vantage point with which to document the various ways the king was exploited. Priscilla doesn’t let Elvis off the hook so easily. From the moment they begin living together, Elvis fashions his child bride in his image, like a pedophilic Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. He also gives her pills, some for falling asleep, some for staying awake. It’s Priscilla who has the foresight to say that these pills could be Elvis’s downfall, but his ego refuses to take any of her advice. With all the pressures of stardom, his expectation of Priscilla is dependability and servitude, which of course explains reeling her in when she’s still a child.

This is the first performance from Elordi that I’ve seen, though his reputation as a Gen Z hunk (burnished by a starring role on HBO’s Euphoria) precedes him. The Australian actor plays Elvis with the correct amount of sinister calculation and youthful abandon. His seduction of Priscilla feels like clockwork. Shades of frailty shield major acts of emotional manipulation, a scheme so second nature to him that he barely even recognizes that he’s doing it. He may not be performing the full-bodied reanimation that Austin Butler did last year, but Elordi’s Elvis is more compelling and, in many ways, more human. It’s not that Elvis is the outright villain of Priscilla – Coppola is too cerebral of a storyteller to make it so binary – but it makes an effort to hold him accountable for his end of the story, and Elordi expertly works toward that end.

With her aloof, detached aesthetic, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Coppola has been actively in the spotlight for her entire life. Her father cast her as an infant in The Godfather before casting her again as Michael’s teenaged daughter in The Godfather Part III (perhaps the most high-profile example of disastrous parenting that Hollywood has ever seen). She’s successfully rebuilt her image as a director and her best films always know a thing or two about being at the whim of a tyrannical man. For women, the palaces of celebrity are but soulless compounds of tedium, barren of affection or validation. There are times when her films trickle into the tedious themselves, but this is probably her best film since Marie Antoinette, which was its own story of a queen reaping the consequences of an infantile king. Coppola finds the humanity here, instead of dictating perpetrators and victims, which makes Priscilla a profound experience.

 

Written for the Screen and Directed by Sofia Coppola