INSIDE STORY OF GRACELAND

RENAISSANCE FILM FOR SOFIA, THE FILMMAKER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The omniscient creator of the back story proves again to be a sublime provocateur of the more delicate emotive responses.

Filmmaker Sofia Coppola takes the production crew through a bit of a creative renaissance to tell the inner story of Priscilla Presley in Priscilla (2023).

Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi are cast well as Priscilla and Elvis in this 1 hour and 53 minute real life love story.

The opening sequence of scenes gradually reveal the appearance of Priscilla as a beautiful but rather young little girl who never seems to really get a chance to grow up throughout the film that begins with the love birds’ courtship in Germany and ends with Priscilla leaving Graceland to petition for divorce.

Coppola keeps the camera in close to create a lot of portrait work from scene to scene with the overall all vision of teasing the audience about the inner thoughts and feelings of one of the most celebrated women in America.

Spaeny does bring the audience along down and around a very delicate emotional rollercoaster from those first feelings of interest that ultimately lead to the bliss in the idea of being in love with the most famous singing artist in the world.

Priscilla lets everyone inside without saying quite a lot such as her learning to dread opening a popular magazine for fear of seeing Elvis in some deep fake romance with another leading Hollywood starlit.

The narrative begins to turn around when Coppola films the high point of their relationship at a pool party shot in a home movie aesthetic with Spaeny holding the 8 mm home movie camera as the scene cuts away. The familiar wedding photos are recreated with the actors standing in for the biographical characters in a way that ever so briefly creates a moment where you think you are looking at the original photographs but are actually looking at their reimagining.

Coppola also shoots the television set to create the atmosphere of the era by showing the television programs on black and white television and the Elvis entourage huddled around watching.

The camera pans through a lot of historically accurate props including the bright shiny new automobiles that are part of Elvis’ motor pool.

Spaeny creates awkward moments beginning with an unease with the age difference and obvious power imbalance. And then once deciding to agree to the relationship and committing to what that means, Priscilla still has a few more awkward moments spending a lot of time waiting around by herself for Elvis to come home.

But then a bit of that Graceland humor rubs off on Priscilla and she becomes all smiles to the delight of everyone, including the audience.

Coppola, apart from being cleverer in scene composition, improves her film art a bit by capturing the little unknown details that only Priscilla would know and then almost stopping everything to capture the moment, such as the smoke from Elvis’s cigarillo while riding inside the car.

The narrative does move forward a bit like going along on a ride in one of the pink Cadillacs parked at Graceland with the popular music of the time coming out of the car radio. Coppola makes an effort to match the imagery of the scenes with the music as opposed to just letting the rhythm of the popular music run away with the narrative.

Several sound advances are also used to move the scenes forward quickly without the use of intense dialogue and action sequences, including sound advances using an original score composed with a xylophone and other percussion instruments by Phoenix.

The slow motion scene at the Los Angeles home with the swimmer rippling the surface water in the pool to the music of Santana is particularly artful.

Aesthetics are more carefully considered throughout the film than in Coppola’s previous films, while at the same time the atmosphere of the whole production being deserving of a nod to cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd. Le Sourd maintains that portraiture tone inside but also that Sixties atmosphere of the new superrich celebrities on the outside with their fancy cars and effortless shopping sprees.

Coppola consistently maintains the idea of exploring the inner self with that whole feeling of isolation and loneliness developed by focusing the camera for the most part on Spaeny. Scenes quite often are portraits of intimate moments remembered from Priscilla’s subjective point of view.

The one flaw is that the script seems to be just touching the surface of the story with the overall production not having that grand sweep of bigger budget films and more complicated narratives, but this approach is also consistent with an autobiographical author’s selective memory that may have been traumatized at such a young age by the glamour and glitz of the Elvis phenomenon. Not something to hold against the filmmaker anyway as that surface storytelling is generally how memories remember.

The film was also well promoted with producers, who included Priscilla Presley as an executive producer, waiting a year after the Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic and then bringing in the film as advertised, as Priscilla’s inner self as told by the film voice of Coppola.

Director, cast and crew create a lot of happiness interspersed with one or two or three and four issues that make Elvis’ personality a bit suspect, but then, as happiness often does, the film suddenly ends.

Priscilla is currently playing in theaters.