‘Priscilla’ Review: Sofia Coppola Finds Meaning In The Small Things, Giving Fresh Point Of View To Familiar Elvis Story – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comThe devil is in the details. Pink-nailed toes scrunching on a pink carpet; a packet of false eyelashes; piles of chips in a Vegas casino; the pills.
Always the pills: squeezed in a palm that opens to reveal its little white prize; lined up in bottles on the bedside table; slipped into a pocket on the way to school. “Maybe the pills are too much,” ventures Priscilla Beaulieu to her boyfriend Elvis Presley, after one of his flares of temper where she just manages to dodge his fist. “I have doctors looking after me,” he growls. “I don’t need a second opinion.” Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, based on Priscilla Presley’s book Elvis and Me and in competition at the Venice Film Festival, doesn’t pull any fancy tricks with timelines or frames of reference; it is a straightforwardly linear retelling of her romance with the King, beginning with the party where she met him in West Germany and ending on the day she left their marriage.
Biopics, especially biopics that never deviate from the facts of a life, often feel plodding. Elvis Presley’s story, moreover, has been told often enough; most people know the bare bones of the Presley story.
Told from his former wife’s point of view, however, it becomes another story altogether. And it is told by Coppola, whose stylistic pizzazz overcomes the dull sense that we know exactly what is going to happen.
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