Film Review: Priscilla doesn't quite paint the full Presley picture

"...while Sofia Coppola does not flinch from depicting Elvis as a controlling and manipulative man, Priscilla remains a largely inscrutable character, and seems to exist solely in relation to Elvis..."

Jacob Elordi stars as Elvis and Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla in the Sofia Coppola flick

• Priscilla
• ★★★☆☆
• (cinema release)

A naive 14-year-old in 1959, Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) can’t believe her luck as Priscilla (15A) opens: invited to a party hosted by Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) at the home he has rented while serving his military service in Germany, Priscilla finds herself living out every teenage girl’s fairytale fantasy when Elvis brings his southern charm to bear on her and her alone. 

But fairytales don’t always have a happy ending, and especially when the handsome prince is the king of rock n roll and the most eligible bachelor on the planet.

Adapted by writer-director Sofia Coppola from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, this biopic opens to the strains of The Ramones’ cover of ‘Baby, I Love You; by The Ronettes, which suggests that we’re in for a punk makeover of Priscilla’s story.

The potential is certainly there, given the famously chaste relationship between the young Priscilla and her 24-year-old beau, and how quickly Elvis evolved from doting upon his girlfriend to first advising her, and then informing her, as to how she should dress, look and behave. 

Alone in America, with no one to guide her, Priscilla finds herself immured in the exquisite mausoleum of Graceland — a heartbreak hotel, indeed — while Elvis and his Memphis mafia live the high life in Hollywood.

However, while Sofia Coppola does not flinch from depicting Elvis as a controlling and manipulative man, and neatly captures the hermetic weirdness that comes with orbiting the most famous man alive, Priscilla remains a largely inscrutable character, and seems to exist solely in relation to Elvis. 

That may well be because the teenage Priscilla, who was married at the relatively tender age of 21 after an extended courtship, had little opportunity to develop emotional and psychological depths worth plumbing. 

Even so, the film seems to skate across the surface of her true and private self. Cailee Spaeny is suitably beautiful, fragile and forlorn as Priscilla, but there is little she can do about the lack of interiority in the script, while Jacob Elordi makes for a convincing Elvis, by turns hip-swaggeringly charismatic and sneeringly cruel. 

It all looks rather fabulous, and the absence of Elvis’s music is hardly noticed, but Priscilla does not quite deliver the hoped-for depth and substance.