‘Priscilla’ review: A quietly unsettling telling of Elvis’ courtship, then neglect of his much younger bride

A man in military uniform approaches a girl in a diner. The girl looks to be 12, 13, maybe 14 years old. The man mentions his friend, who is 24 years old, a man who is among the most famous people on the planet. Would she like to meet him? Come to his house for a party?

If that scene played out in 2023, someone would have their phone out to capture video of this scary moment, and somebody else might be jumping over the counter to get that man away from that girl, and rightfully so. What in the actual world.

In Sofia Coppola’s quietly unsettling, haunting and dreamlike yet authentic-feeling “Priscilla,” that scene is set in 1959 West Germany, and as you’ve surmised, the girl in the diner is 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, an Army brat who is about to be swept up in the chaotic and unreal and sometimes dark fantasyland world of one Elvis Presley, whose career as the biggest star on the planet was put on hold as he served as a member of the 1st Medium Tank Battalion from the fall of 1958 until the spring of 1960.

The setting and context don’t mean we’re any less appalled, but writer-director Coppola (adapting the 1985 book “Elvis and Me” by Priscilla and Sandra Harmon) allows the material to breathe and speak for itself without hammering us with the obvious moral queasiness attached to this story. (Still, we’re never NOT aware of the startling age difference, though it’s Elvis who repeatedly puts off consummation. After all, when Elvis first meets Priscilla, he exclaims: Why, you’re just a baby.)

We also know where this is going: Not only will Priscilla quickly fall under Elvis’ spell, she will eventually become his wife. Comparisons to Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette,” which also had themes of a girl/young woman who is boxed in a gilded cage, are valid, but the film I was reminded of most was “Spencer.” That 2021 film told the story of the star-crossed relationship between Kristen Stewart’s Diana Spencer and Jack Farthing’s Prince Charles, which commenced when Diana was 16 and Charles was 29, and was over by the time Diana was 30. (“Spencer” and “Priscilla” have strikingly similar closing scenes.)

Cailee Spaeny, who played the teenage single mother in “The Mare of Easttown,” has the title role here, and it is a star-making, beautifully rendered, subtle performance. Jacob Elordi from “Euphoria” and the upcoming “Saltburn” is the latest in a long line of actors from Kurt Russell to Austin Butler to take on Elvis, and while Elordi’s towering height is jarring at first — he’s 6-foot-5 and at least a head taller than everyone in the film — it eventually works as a constant reminder of the ways in which Elvis controlled and dominated Priscilla, from telling her to dye her hair black and wear more eye makeup to dictating which colors she could wear to plying her with pills to make her sleep, pills to pep her up again.

(The filmmakers apparently didn’t have the rights to Elvis’ catalog, but that actually works in favor of the film. This is Priscilla’s story, taking place largely in Graceland, which becomes a cavernous and cold prison most of the time, with Elvis off making records and shooting yet another terrible film while the tabloids report on his alleged romances with his leading ladies, and Priscilla being told she can’t even play with her puppy on the grounds because the fans and paparazzi are always lurking behind the gates.)

Elordi, who affects Presley’s speech patterns and mannerisms without ever delving into broad impersonation, plays Elvis as an insecure, sometimes violent, self-consumed man-child who would rather spend time goofing off with his “Memphis Mafia” than with Priscilla; even after they’re married and they have a child, it’s almost as if they don’t know one another. When Priscilla enters a room and greets Elvis, she simply says, “Hi,” as if they’re just acquaintances.

“Priscilla” moves at a languid pace, taking its time with those early courtship scenes in Germany, as Elvis announces his intentions to Priscilla’s understandably concerned but overwhelmed parents (Dagmara Dominczyk and Ari Cohen, both excellent), and picking up Priscilla for chaste dates, as when they hold hands at the movies as Elvis mouths Bogart’s lines in “Beat the Devil” and later tells Priscilla he wants to make movies like “On the Waterfront” and have a career like Brando’s or James Dean’s. (It wasn’t even close, not with the offscreen Col. Parker controlling every aspect of Elvis’ career.) Once the story moves stateside — to Memphis, Vegas and Los Angeles — and Elvis goes through the rollercoaster ups and downs of his career through the 1960s and 1970s, Priscilla is often on the sidelines of her own life.

Spaeny, with the aid of Coppola’s finely honed script and the first-tier makeup and wardrobe teams, does a marvelous job of capturing Priscilla’s transition from a ninth-grader who finds herself starring in her own fairy tale to a 28-year-old mother who knew her marriage was over long before it was finally over.