Sofia Coppola’s 'Priscilla' Avoids the Common Trap of True-Story Adaptations

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Minor spoilers below.

“When Elvis saw something he liked, he didn’t think in terms of age.” Or so writes Priscilla Beaulieu Presley (and her co-author, Sandra Harmon) in the 1985 tell-all Elvis and Me, a book that operates as both sensational celebrity memoir and affectionate, even-handed tribute to a marriage—no small feat for its genre. In this particular passage, the author is referring to the mature clothing and dark makeup the King of Rock and Roll would hand-pick for his future bride. But she might as well be referencing the beginning of their relationship itself, when a 24-year-old Elvis first laid eyes on a 14-year-old Priscilla and liked what he saw.

As the new Sofia Coppola-directed film Priscilla understands, there’s no getting around this simple fact. Elvis began his romantic relationship with Priscilla when she was still a child, regardless of whether that relationship was consummated sexually in that same period. (Per Priscilla, this distinction was a matter of particular importance to Elvis, as we’ll get into later.) Coppola also realizes it’s not her job to interrogate every fact of Priscilla’s account in Elvis and Me, which the director adapts with near-absolute fidelity, often lifting entire lines of dialogue from the book itself.

I’ve written before about the dangers of negligent fictionalization. The same can be true of negligent fidelity—adhering to a particular story without questioning its validity. But unlike, say, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, Priscilla doesn’t present itself as representative of a whole: It doesn’t pretend to capture “the most important thing” about Priscilla, nor does it posit a full portrait of Elvis as a man, let alone as an artist. (That directive is more in line with Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis.) In contrast, Priscilla is a precise, purposefully sequestered depiction of Elvis and Priscilla’s romance as she experienced it, refracted through the lens of her adoration. That’s a perspective Coppola recognizes she mustn’t interfere with. Yet neither can she shy away from the darker elements that Priscilla herself documented for posterity.

It’s in this balance that Priscilla triumphs. The young Beaulieu—as depicted by the splendid actress Cailee Spaeny—is not a Lolita-like “nymphet,” nor a woman fully capable of comprehending her sudden, elevated status. She is neither victim nor arbiter: Even as a teenager, she is both an orchestrator of Elvis’ attentions and a byproduct of their whims. It is by grace that such a character would receive the Coppola treatment, given the director’s penchant for capturing the loneliness, excess, and emotion that define a certain sort of girlhood.

Priscilla makes few deviations from Elvis and Me, and in so far as Priscilla’s personal account is to be believed, the film is an accurate depiction of the couple’s true story. The film begins much like Elvis and Priscilla’s romance did: with Priscilla encountering the singer at a 1959 party in Bad Nauheim, West Germany, where the then-Army soldier was stationed. Their first conversation takes place exactly as Priscilla describes it in Elvis and Me: The singer, eyeing the 14-year-old with interest, declares she’s “just a baby” once he’s learned she’s a ninth-grade student. Later, he invites her to return to his Bad Nauheim home, where the two eventually share their first kiss. Priscilla writes in the book:

From there, the relationship only evolved, with Elvis meeting Priscilla’s parents before he was due to return to the U.S. in March of 1960. After bidding him goodbye at the airport, she pined for him from afar, as Priscilla depicts with Coppola’s signature set design, planting Spaeny in a childhood bedroom outfitted with exquisite Elvis paraphernalia. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis stares back at her on record covers and news articles as she writes to him on pale pink stationary, begging the King not to forget her. As Priscilla tells it:

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” or so goes the cliché. But I’d argue the far more potent power is found in a young, isolated woman’s devotion to her first love—whether that be a boy, a girl, an activity, or some other object of affinity (like, say, the repertoire of Taylor Swift). Coppola appreciates this power far better than many directors working today, which is why she never even considers mocking Priscilla’s infatuation—even if the young Beaulieu’s pencil-lined eyes and beehive haircut might evoke titters from the audience. Coppola treats the potency of girlhood with the respect it merits, even as Priscilla makes alarming decisions, such as the choice to finish high school while living with Elvis in Graceland, his Memphis mansion.

Within Graceland’s elegant but inscrutable facade, she fully transforms into the woman of his dreams, adopting his iconic black hair and high-collared shirts, topping up his water glasses and delivering his bacon on a platter. We watch this evolution on camera just as Priscilla described it:

She stays awake late into the evening, attending movies and trips to the fairgrounds with Elvis and his rambunctious band of friends. We watch as Spaeny’s Priscilla resorts to popping pills and cheating on exams in order to survive her senior year. “Often I wouldn’t get home until 5 or 6 a.m., and I’d have to be at school two hours later,” Priscilla writes in Elvis and Me. “Sometimes I never went to sleep.”

In the bedroom, their relationship is even more complicated: Per Elvis and Me, Elvis refused to consummate his romance with Priscilla until the two were married, explaining the act was a “very sacred thing” he wanted to “save.” Here, Coppola lifts another scene from the book, transposing Priscilla’s short anecdote about “dressing up” for Elvis to a montage that perfectly mirrors the marriage of scandal and endearment that defines Priscilla’s memoir. Spaeny and Elordi scramble over each other in Elvis’ plush, cavernous bedroom, vying for dominance as they snap Polaroids of their costumes in between long, drawn-out kisses. The scene captures both their power struggle and their genuine delight in each other’s company, simply by reading between the lines of Priscilla’s words:

There is much that Priscilla packs into its 113-minute runtime: the iconic wedding between new American royalty; the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley; the couple’s confrontation over Elvis’ affair(s); the King’s obsession with philosophy and spirituality; his residency at the International Hotel in Vegas; even the flashes of violence mentioned in Elvis and Me, when Elvis would lose his temper by hurling a pillow or, in at least one instance, a chair. But there’s just as much that the film purposefully excludes: Priscilla makes room for only one of Elvis’ most iconic performances—and, even then, it only frames the singer from behind—nor does it utilize any of his musical catalog. There’s time to watch Priscilla apply her false eyelashes at the hospital before she gives birth, but no more than a few seconds are devoted to Priscilla’s relationship with karate expert Mike Stone, with whom she eventually had an affair. We also never see Elvis and Priscilla divorce; instead, we watch her tell her husband she’s leaving, and drive away from Graceland to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” This final scene evokes the mood of Priscilla’s own words, without needing to use a single one of them:

Coppola must know that Priscilla remains a somewhat controversial figure to this day. She also knows that this particular story isn’t without its detractors: As Variety first reported, Lisa Marie reached out to Coppola ahead of her tragic death in January. After reading an early version of the script, Elvis’ daughter expressed dismay, writing, “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative. As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father.” That version of the script was later cut by about 10 pages—and, it’s worth noting, Elordi’s Elvis comes across much more sympathetically than the facts of the story might otherwise suggest.

This is because Coppola recognizes that to replicate every facet of Elvis’ or Priscilla’s complicated life would be to manufacture ersatz stand-ins, not to mention blur the focus of her own storytelling. Too often, audiences look to biopics as all-encompassing portraits of their idols. And while many of these pictures do, indeed, offer a commendably complex version of their subjects, the best of these films realize that it’s only with precision that emotional truth is carved from the rough. By necessity, these movies will make omissions. (What matters is which omissions.) Others might even deviate from reality—a choice that can be justified, but only if executed with care. For those, like Priscilla, that approach their subjects with both a respect for real events and a narrative scalpel, the final product is all the more crystalline.

Priscilla avoids the pitfalls of so many true-story adaptations like it, simply because it succeeds in its intent—which is not to highlight the “truest” or most “complete” version of Priscilla Presley, but to sharpen the one we might have otherwise overlooked: the girl, young and in love, awakening to the life ahead of her. In her bedroom, with the radio on, we can understand the teenage Priscilla with a new tenderness, and respect her all the more when she must move on.

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