There’s no getting around the ick factor at the center of “Priscilla,” the acclaimed new film by Sofia Coppola. Its title character, Priscilla Beaulieu, was 14 years old in 1959 when she met her future husband Elvis Presley, then one of the most famous people on the planet.
Priscilla (played by Cailee Spaeny) was a military brat living in what was then West Germany, where Elvis, who was 24, was stationed during his stint in the U.S. Army at the height of his celebrity.
She’s approached by a man who asks her to attend a party at Elvis’s rental house, where she catches the eye of the King himself (Jacob Elordi). When he learns her age, Elvis says, “You’re just a baby,” in a tone that suggests genuine bewilderment more so than creepy deviance.
Nonetheless, so begins what her stunned schoolmates would have considered a fairy-tale love story. Priscilla’s skeptical stepfather (Ari Cohen) asks Elvis a question the film never quite answers, which is, why would a man who could have anything and anyone he wanted set his sights on a petite ninth-grader?
Whatever his reasons, Elvis’s courtship of Priscilla was at least sincere, and their mutual feelings are real. A few years later he summons her to Graceland and arranges for her to finish high school nearby. Before long, they’re married.
But the whirlwind romance that might have existed in Priscilla’s imagination surely did not include the part where she effectively became a prisoner at Graceland. Elvis pampered her but forbade her from working, so she could be available whenever he called from tour or the set of a movie, where his flings with co-stars filled the tabloids she read while sitting at home.
The lifestyles of the rich and captive are familiar territory for Coppola, whose best films have been about women in gilded cages, from the luxuriant ennui of “Lost In Translation” (2003) to the suburban isolation of “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) to the claustrophobic decadence of “Marie Antoinette” (2006).
“Priscilla,” based on Priscilla’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” contains none of Presley’s music, which could signal discord within the Presley estate about the depiction of Elvis. Priscilla, still alive, is a producer on the film, but their daughter Lisa Marie, before she died earlier this year, had reportedly objected to the film’s portrayal of her father as a borderline abusive groomer.
Post-#MeToo, it would have been easy to position “Priscilla” as a feminist takedown of yet another icon of American masculinity. Instead it’s a nuanced portrayal of a relationship that was sad and difficult for plenty of reasons besides its considerable age gap and obvious power imbalance.
Elordi plays Elvis as a Freudian analyst’s dream case study: an overgrown boy surrounded by hangers-on and frozen at the age he became famous, closely attached to a mother who’d just died, minimally interested in sex and fixated on the purity of his child-bride.
“Priscilla” finds sympathy for Elvis the man while it quietly deconstructs the myth perpetuated across countless movies, the most notable and recent of which was Baz Luhrmann’s splashy 2022 biopic “Elvis.” Coppola’s film recognizes that the King’s story is its own kind of tragedy, one of addiction, manipulation, stunted adult development and talent opportunistically mismanaged.
Since it’s not directly his story, the only glimpses we see of Elvis’s transcendent performing talents are some fleeting images from the Las Vegas jumpsuit era. And the people pulling his strings — such as manager Colonel Tom Parker and the shady physician George “Dr. Nick” Nichopoulos — likewise remain offscreen.
The person controlling Priscilla is the one who knows everything about her besides how to love her tender. The film is her journey toward realizing how much more she deserves, and toward finding her own identity after spending years as another person’s accessory.
When she gets there, it’s long after we’ve stopped wondering why Elvis was interested in Priscilla and start asking, once the fairy-tale glow fades, why she would want to be with him.