There’s a lot of quiet — in an empty living room save for one woman, at Graceland, in other spaces, a few seconds of solitude representing minutes and hours and years — in the new film “Priscilla,” from writer-director Sofia Coppola.
The movie couldn’t tell its truth without it. We’re witnessing a version of Priscilla Presley’s singularly strange and wondrous life in the eye of the hurricane known as Elvis Presley. Last year’s Baz Luhrmann “Elvis” biopic had little interest in the eye; the movie was all hurricane and fancy packaging. “Priscilla” opens a different and, I think, far more intriguing package.
Coppola has made a generation’s worth of features by now, since “The Virgin Suicides” in 1999. This is her eighth, not counting her staging of an Italian opera production of Verdi’s “La Traviata.” “Priscilla” is one of her best, as well as her latest, most carefully considered evocation of celebrity, intimacy and the tantalizing, precarious intersection of the two.
It begins with a close-up of orange-red toenails on pale, rose-colored shag carpet. It is 1959. Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, played with remarkable ease from ages 14 to 27 by Cailee Spaeny, adapts as well as she can as a vaguely disoriented fish out of water. A military brat accustomed to relocations, Priscilla finds herself in West Germany, where her mother and U.S. Air Force stepfather have moved.
The biggest star in the universe is stationed there, too. Through an intermediary at the local malt shop, Priscilla receives an invite to a little party at GI Elvis Presley’s place. Frankie Avalon’s yearning “Venus” sets the mood for their first meeting, negotiated, torturously, with her parents’ wary approval. At the nighttime party — lent all the right, shadowy promise of something forbidden by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd — Priscilla’s scoped by the eagle eyes of women and men closer to Elvis’s age than to the ninth-grader in their midst.
Elvis, Priscilla has been told in advance, likes to meet folks from back home. It takes one kiss from this unique combination of superstar confidence/bashful mama’s boy for Priscilla’s head to swim with the incredibility of it all. (This was a highly strategic courtship; she didn’t become Priscilla Presley until she turned 18.) “Priscilla,” the movie, exists in a state of hushed wonderment, magical one minute, bittersweet the next.
Soon enough, this star-kissed teenager’s life is the stuff of ever more amazing waking dreams. First, with Elvis away in Hollywood making movies and whoopee with Nancy Sinatra or Ann-Margret or players to be named later, in tell-alls, Priscilla becomes an unmarried but spoken-for princess at Graceland, Elvis’s Tennessee palace. The pills, which Elvis gets her on early and often, turn Elvis into an experiment in chemical imbalance. Everywhere he goes, a Greek chorus of musicians and yes-men goes, too.
Coppola, who has known more first- and second-hand celebrity than the average contemporary filmmaker, seems especially well-attuned to Priscilla’s experiences, and to slowly (sometimes suddenly) dawning realizations of what her life has become. Now and then “Priscilla” settles for standard-issue biopic shorthand, as when Elvis shuts down his woman’s desire to work with: “It’s either me or career, baby.” But in this context, without the usual emphasis or underlining, the line feels honest, and authentic, even in the midst of the dream of desire, love and eventual departure we’re watching.
The ending’s a little less than it should be, I suppose, and Coppola has never made movies (“Lost in Translation” being a possible exception) that follow prescribed, crowd-pleasing narrative paths. You won’t find anything about Colonel Tom Parker here, or much glitz beyond a few really tasty transitional montages, blending archival footage of Las Vegas, for example, with some classically inclined shots of the roulette wheel spinning and Priscilla and Elvis, looking like down-home royalty.
What you get with Coppola’s perspective, and Priscilla Presley’s, is a small, sure film about the largest of royal showbiz lives led in the brightest, harshest of spotlights, or in the unsettling quiet of a room, where someone has just left it with a little less oxygen. Thanks to “Priscilla,” we know a little more about how Priscilla Presley found herself there in the first place — and, with an incisive kind of restraint, what it may have looked, felt and hurt like.
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‘PRISCILLA’
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for drug use and some language)
Running time: 1:53
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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