'Priscilla' briefing

3 (out of 4)

            On the Rocks watered down and bottomed out Sofia Coppola’s career as its tasteless, out-of-touch, sitcom-premise bullshitting-about found her on autopilot and Bill Murray at his most lethargic — to my chagrin and surprise, the movie is one of her best-reviewed. Maybe that’s because everything since Lost in Translation has been a little spacious and experimental, with Sofia’s quintessentially airy aura just foggy enough to receive mixed reactions for Marie Antoinette (her first, most relevant biopic, a revisionist treat), Somewhere (retrospectively one her most celebrated, perhaps her most personally inspired, not-quite-autobiographical work outside of Lost) and the blunt-force Cali-crazy satire The Bling Ring, with better scores for the soured Southern Comfort of The Beguiled (remake of an Eastwood-starring flick from the 70s).

If not for the overarching irony that Priscilla, intentionally or no, can’t escape The King’s shadow despite an executive producer credit from Ms. Presley herself, the disquieting ending rounded out a structure situating Priscilla as almost anti-feminist given there’s not a single moment that’s not about Elvis, as if her life is only narratively, cinematically worthy if it’s Elvis-the-Pelvis-adjacent from scene one. I suppose the whole project concerns an inability to be her own person, plus Priscilla's autobiography is literally called Elvis and Me, look I get it OK — Coppola, oddly, rejects feminist labels despite their appropriate application in particular portions of her career, here especially.

This Elvis (Jacob Elordi exuberantly shooting from the hip) has one bit of music performance in the beginning and otherwise Presley is only who he was to his wife, which was quite the character — it’s hard not to simply see a man who spotted some underage girl and decided to keep the poor doting thing on the back burner for as long as he could justify, Presley’s prudent pants making this girl wait to get deflowered for years and years… There’s an intense parallel between the seeming impotence of both Jason Schwartzmann’s King Louis XVI from Antoinette and the King himself here, whether you’re too pussy to screw your Austrian-born queen or too tasteful of a manipulative groomer to take advantage of your virginal bride-in-the-works — the bedroom is a place of confusion, awkwardness and disappointment in Sofia’s eye, at least as far the subjects of her diabolically genre-upending biopics are concerned. Like Marie A, the love story is forced, stupid and unreal, but there is an earnestness that suggests flesh and blood humans caught in terrible unions.

Like many great juxtapositions of rapture and loneliness, there’s an element of the way in which couples can still be strangers to each other, and how the illusion is only broken when one doesn’t fulfill the fantasy the other has in their head — Priscilla wants Elvis to be a real husband and father, and Elvis wants someone under his thumb to come back home to after the tours and movie shoots. She’s his perfectly unsullied maiden, he the 50s teenager’s daydream manifest… Of course Priscilla is left gaping at any of his absences, especially if Elvis kissed you when you were FOURTEEN, yeah no girl is getting over that without some serious convincing. It’s a fairy tale slowly poisoned by constant cheating, intolerable isolation and at least a decade of lustful, readymade romantic entropy to undo.

So this one is not quite as dreamlike, meditative and pensive (and all the other words I pull out for Sofia’s particular stylistic preferences) as her usual cinematic incisions. Even in a less intense shade her ticks perfectly match the idea of poor Priscilla sitting around a mansion in Memphis, doing little other than biding time until her cheating-ass, wigglin’-ass boyfriend comes around for an apology or to impregnate you. At first you want to buy the whole grieving, gentlemanly facade — the movie even mindfucks you into thinking you’ve entered his sex dungeon, before he’s going “Not so fast, baby” for years on end. Restraining himself until legal age could be vaguely upstanding enough if you don’t consider the literal parade of grown-up tail he got probably each and every night away from the Mrs. or soon-to-be. So if you ignore all that, he wasn’t a bad influence, oh wait except for the copious drug addictions, emotional abuse and controlling every aspect of her public image.

But ALL THAT SAID Coppola is too matter-of-fact to let this be some prepaid woe-is-me exposé — the movie didn’t become a #metoo moment, you have to respect how unexaggerated it is. Elvis is doused in a most unflattering light and yet he is only so vilified, Coppola resists grossly manipulating a peculiar pairing (more than Presley could), and at its best it feels like any other strong relationship drama, only within the most ludicrous context of all time. The few scenes they’re together you can sense something of a special bond, only to be punctuated by the extravagant outbursts or seasons of abandonment of the housewife-shaped trophy on the mantelpiece you dust off when you make you homeward reset.

Cailee Spaeny has this incredible face that changes, as in seems to actually get older — I bought this 24-year-old at every single age. She’s got one of those mesmerizing, pliable kinda visages, she’s beautiful but every single different look was a detailed dead ringer on top of a performance that sold it. Take a talented, understated young person, an extremely dexterous makeup and costume department absolutely nailing every part of her romantic mythology with Elvis, and then bookend it with her actually looking like herself, the real Priscilla free of the intense mascara and puffed up black hair, and there you have the actual astonishment of cinematic real-life character studies. Jacob is almost good enough to overshadow Spaeny — he’s got some facial advantages too, that takes you plenty of the way there. Sure Elvis wasn’t some 6’5” Abercrombie model but apart from the lips he is the spitting image of Mr. Thank You Very Much in the right light, far more often than Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis just last year. Not to shit on Butler’s studied, excessive surliness but Jacob casually strips the affect, proving off the cuff can be a better method even if a matching head shape is doing too many favors. However you slice it these are two smashingly good performances, easily some of the best I’ve seen this year.

So by the reduction of sensation (there’s nothing downplayed under Luhrmann’s garish, gaudy, crazy-ass direction) Coppola has naturally made one of the most agreeable, exceptionally fortifying biopics of recent times and it will probably make a tenth of the money Elvis made — that film only had time for Priscilla in the courtship and the later regret and not much in between. Because of what Sofia finds cinematic, one of her most eventful movies to date becomes one of the genre’s most refreshingly dry renditions — Priscilla, not unlike Oppenheimer, finds strength in subjectivity, making for an anti-biopic in the best way. Coppola gradually illustrates the slow grind of social or romantic subjugation, and the psychology is more subtle, if less obscured and mournful than The Virgin Suicides' pretentious investigations of the unknowable minds of teenage girls, and otherwise I believed it to be the great plain Jane companion piece to Luhrmann’s squishy sensationalism in Elvis til I realized it was far more interesting, if less overtly entertaining.

Musically, even with the anachronisms alongside Coppola’s other aesthetic augmentations, plus a hurdle as big as the estate refusing rights to use Elvis' music, Sofia's husband and lead singer of Phoenix (akin to another internationally famous French pop group Air, which helped shape the strange, pretty, prickly vibes of her debut Virgin Suicides) Thomas Mars congeals even decades-removed cuts like they happened to be historically accurate. While there’s nothing as radical as a Strokes song in 17th century France, the 50s-late-60s era lets Coppola synthesize yet another incredible curation of sounds both informing and disrupting what she’s capturing on-camera — God there is some unregulated bliss cutting to roller-rink fun times synced with “Forever” by The Little Dippers. While her films once again prove masterclass in poetic, patrician, collage-like soundtrack selection, this mature turn was hardly an assault of ambience.

Overall this was a filmography redeemer, an intuitive subject for Coppola’s eye for sugary, almost antiquated artifice — Priscilla's outfit-matched, color-coated guns are so cute Coppola can’t help but lay the shot out and savor it. She also loves a good, meaningful photo shoot scene, several if the subject allows, with some measure of upper class realism or whatever, which this subject of course has loads of, it’s just her thing. Her caustic realism too shapes the sometimes baffling humor and painful ironies of Priscilla’s place in her own life, separate and also among the masses. It’s got the modern/classical paradox beat from both ends, sporting a jaunty, New Wave edge, forming a piquant hybrid of all these styles — Coppola's best in 15 years slides into a shining spot within her own neat little auteur corner.

Is the daughter, the Presley heir, wrong for speaking out? Do you hate your Mom? Maybe your Dad wasn’t so great and a culture of celebrity worship needs people like Sofia to take them down a peg and repeatedly demystify worship-worthy status. And that’s why she was perfect for the whole game of misusing stardom since the internal anguish of Priscilla’s situation is so specific — Spaeny’s version isn’t even particularly, painfully jealous but no other woman in the last century at least would have more of a right to keep tabs on her man, and it becomes a universal statement on the disparate dominant-submissive dichotomy of celebrity/non-celebrity couples.