With the icon of Elvis Presley consuming every 2022 award show and film-talking media outlet following the release of Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, Elvis!, eyes were rolled when news came out that a film surrounding Priscilla Presley was in the works. However, when Sofia Coppola was announced to be the creator, those minds were quickly changed. Writer and director of films like The Virgin Suicides (1998) and Marie Antoinette (2006), Coppola has made a name for herself as the portrayer of girlhood- its all-consuming blissfulness and utter torture. “Across all of my films, there is a common quality: there is always a world and there is always a girl trying to navigate it,” Coppola told The Guardian earlier this year, “That’s the story that will always intrigue me.” More specifically, strong but lonely women are a recurring theme in Coppola’s work, as shown before in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and that idea continues to be embedded into her telling of Priscilla Presley’s story.
Based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, Priscilla begins in a small coffee shop in 1950s Germany, where the fourteen-year-old titular character (Cailee Spainey) is approached and asked if she is fond of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). “Of course, who isn’t?” she responds, marking the beginning of a famously warped love story. After growing close to the 24-year-old Elvis, when he returns to Graceland, his Memphis home, Priscilla leaves her life to come along. There, she continues living out her teenage years, now in an anomalous setting, however, as Elvis works all day in the starlight while Priscilla completes her homework in the palatial house. When she is not working, she is waiting by the door for Elvis to walk through it, as if she is a little kid missing her working father. Scenes where Priscilla seems to be enjoying herself in her endeavors slowly grow to be much shorter, while the mature moments she had to boringly endure tend to drag on, essentially capturing the inside workings of Priscilla’s young mind.
The glamorous parts of Elvis soon start to fade and his flaws slowly begin to shine. “I didn’t want the darker side of their relationship to completely overshadow the film, so it was a matter of trying to show the reality,” Coppola told Vogue on the day of the film’s release, “It was important to Priscilla that it was still her love story and to show Elvis as a real human being instead of some two-dimensional villain.” Despite the good in Elvis and his affection for Priscilla, the dark times always came like an unexpected, lingering storm cloud of abuse, just waiting to strike again. Whether he threw a chair at Priscilla after she stated her opinions on his next record, or blamed her paranoia when Priscilla accused him of his existent lack of loyalty, Elvis always crawled back to her in a plea for forgiveness. And Priscilla always accepted the apologies, until she didn’t. “She spent so much of her life trying to please someone else before realizing she had to learn more about what she wanted out of life,” Coppola explained. In Priscilla, Sofia Coppola presents a woman strapped to a classic image of Americana, living through a dream almost every girl craved to live; but here, she flips that idea on its head and reminds us of Priscilla’s needs and desires for so much more.
The film sparked controversy among modern Elvis fans even before its release, as the Elvis Presley estate loudly voiced their disapproval of his portrayal. According to Vulture, after watching a cut of the film during its previews, a leading official of the estate told TMZ that Coppola’s writing and directing was “horrible,” and the movie appeared as something similar to “a college movie.” Soon after this news was released, Variety additionally reported that Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, had sent emails to Coppola before her death in January of 2023, addressing her distaste for how her father was being depicted. “As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character,” she wrote in one of her early emails, “…I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why.” In her response, Coppola said that she hoped Lisa Marie would feel differently once the film was released, as she was “also presenting [Elvis] with sensitivity and complexity.” Later, when asked whether this encounter changed her approach to the film’s making, Coppola told Deadline, “No, because I had always wanted to be sensitive and really show how I interpreted Priscilla talking about him, which was not damning at all.”
Despite a majority of the Presley family’s dissatisfaction with the film, Priscilla continued with her promotion and spoken approval of Coppola and her work. “I’ve seen all of her movies,” Priscilla told Rolling Stone when asked about trusting Coppola with her story, “and her sensitivity, her understanding of women, she puts her heart and soul into it…I would never do this with anyone else… She just got me, and I trusted her.”
Continuously growing her reputation for depicting women and their needs, as well as their forgotten desires, Sofia Coppola has become one of the most important directors of her generation. With the Elvis estate not allowing his music to be used throughout the film, part of his shining aura is stripped from him and he comes off as a regular man with cruel inclination and dubiously charming love. Beside him, Priscilla comes off as a young girl who was forced into maturity at a young age, and the understanding of her purpose was postponed until it was too substantial to ignore. Looking back at every film in her career, Sofia Coppola has done the unthinkable time and time again. Women around the world, whose minds can’t seem to summarize the wonderfully bruising moments of girlhood, are repeatedly grateful for her power in doing just that.
