Priscilla
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Running time: 1hr53 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi in Priscilla
The height of an actor is not usually something to which I give much thought. I have friends and colleagues who feel otherwise, fixating on why so-and-so is too tall or short for such-and-such a role, or who marvel at how certain stars are so much taller (or, usually, shorter) in person than you might expect. I just assume the film crew will dig the requisite ditches, or source the requisite shoe lifts, to make it work on screen, and trust their judgement.
In Priscilla, however, Sofia Coppola expressly wants you to think about height — specifically that of lanky Australian dreamboat Jacob Elordi, cast as Coppola’s perma-brooding Elvis Presley. Elordi’s 6’6” frame would have made Elvis (himself a perfectly cromulent 5’11”) a diminutive figure by comparison; next to the 5’1” Cailee Spaeny, cast as Elvis’s initially teenage lover Priscilla Beaulieu, he practically looks a different species. We know enough of Coppola’s cinema by now to know that no visual detail is accidental; on screen here, the inaccurate height differential between Elvis and Priscilla isn’t tempered, but exaggerated to the point you wonder if Spaeny’s the one standing in ditches, and Elordi in platform heels. In scene after scene, he looms over her, sometimes paternally, sometimes threateningly, sometimes in a manner actively akin to a baleful sleep demon, but never in a manner that implies equal power.
Through such details, Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s marriage memoir emerges not as a standard biopic, but as a kind of Gothic fairy tale, with Priscilla as a Vegas-Victorian child bride, hunched and chilly in a pastel castle of rhinestones and deep-pile carpeting. We meet her as a ponytailed, baby pink-jumpered 14-year-old, innocently sipping a soda at a US Army base diner, her whole life ahead of her; it’s no spoiler to say that we leave her, 14 years later, on the brink of divorce, her whole life ahead of her. It’s a deft feat of Spaeny’s Venice-awarded performance that she convincingly plays Priscilla at both these ages, and all those in between, yet it’s also the film’s strange, sad design that she hardly seems to age in the process. Following her heroine as she’s swept away from reality by the most famous man in the world, kept and cosseted and disempowered in the padded halls of Graceland, only for his ruin to augur her belated, independent coming of age, Coppola makes Priscilla a story of a girlhood prematurely taken, and then preserved in glittery amber.
It’s all a very different world from the more fabulously spangled star cocoon that surrounded the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last year — shorn of his music (perhaps for legal reasons, though it pointedly works in the film’s favour), Priscilla is a quieter, echo-y, more melancholic experience; Elordi’s backgrounded but oh-so-tall Elvis is all shadow and shiver, inspiring screaming hysteria in public and an anxious hush in private. As a story of grooming and imbalanced authority in a doomed relationship, it’s potent but not not without empathy for either partner: how, Coppola asks, can two people in separate gilded cages ever be together?
PRISCILLA (2023) Written by Sofia Coppola | Shot by Philippe Le Sourd | Edited by Sarah Flack