PRISCILLA (2023) – A shallow and irrelevant account of a fairy tale without a happy ending

This biopic of Priscilla Presley is based on her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. With Priscilla Presley taking on the role of one of the film’s Executive Producers, one cannot help but wonder how much of what is depicted on screen is truly an accurate representation of what really happened, or whether this is just a version of the truth as seen through the eyes of Priscilla herself. This thought keeps popping up to me as I watched this as it had a fairy tale element to it and a central character that seems to be faultless.

Priscilla is directed by Sofia Coppola who is the daughter of the legendary film maker Francis Ford Coppola. Sofia has been in the business for a long time and has established herself as a very talented director in her own right. I am a fan of her movies as they are often entertainingly unique and unorthodox even when dealing with conventional subjects (eg Maria Antoinette, Lost in Translation, Somewhere and The Bling Ring). Sadly, Priscilla is my least favorite of her movies.

The pacing here is excruciatingly slow with many scenes that does not seem to contribute much to the overall story. We have always envisioned Elvis to be someone who is larger than life but here he is relegated to someone who is very much low key in mannerism and charisma. The film makers were not able to secure the rights to any of Elvis’s music which resulted in a vital element to missing in the film’s score that could have helped remind us of his magic. The Elvis here could very well have been any generic super rich and famous guy.

The matching of Priscilla and Elvis has its share of controversy and challenges for it to have been pulled off. Priscilla was apparently only 14 years of age when she met an enlisted Elvis in Germany who was 10 years her senior at that time. This means she was below the legal age of consent at that time. The movie however tells us that the relationship was all very innocent, proper and nonsexual in nature. Yeah right … Then there was the physical height difference. Priscilla was apparently 5 foot 4 inches which is 8 inches shorter than Elvis. The film makers here seem to think that 8 inches was not wide enough and had the actor playing Elvis, Jacob Elordi standing at a towering 6 foot 5 inches over the diminutive Cailee Spaeny who plays Priscilla. Cailee is just below 5 feet so that makes her shorter than her co-star by 17 inches which is a huge exaggeration to the real-life height difference between Priscilla and Elvis. I felt this was a bit high handed of Sofia Coppola who seem to use this to her benefit to highlight the height difference abate in an exaggerated way, without actually making any reference to it directly. It also indirectly highlighted the age difference as Priscilla looked like a child walking with an adult when they are side by side.

Cailee Spaeny does a reasonably good job in the starring role as she convincingly played Priscilla from the age ranging from 14 through to 28. However, she was not given much opportunity to provide as wide a range emotionally and her Priscilla ended being effectively a prisoner under Elvis’s control. Her range here was predominately to look angelic and innocent. Jacob Elordi was totally unconvincing at Elvis and came across to me as someone who is not Elvis. He doesn’t look like Elvis, doesn’t sound like Elvis and doesn’t move like Elvis. He was not given a chance to sing or perform like Elvis but I have no doubt he would not be anywhere close to the real thing either.

I feel Priscilla was a missed opportunity for Sofia to have come up with something great and Academy Award worthy. Instead, what we got seems more like a propaganda for Priscilla Priestley to paint herself as the sweet and innocent girl who has a fairy tale romance with Elvis and ended up less than happily ever after. She seems to have compromised her usual standard with a one-sided story and equipped herself with less than a stellar cast. Comparisons to last year’s phenomenal biopic of Elvis by Baz Luhrmann is inevitable. The reality is these are two very different movies and there is simply no comparison! I am still recommending this solely to Sofia Coppola fans as we haven’t seen any movie from her since On the Rocks in 2020.