Priscilla

Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmara Domińczyk, Tim Post, Lynne Griffin, Daniel Beirne, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, Dan Abramovici, R. Austin Ball, Stephanie Moore
Running Time: 114 min.
Rating: R

★★★ (out of ★★★★)

Going into Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, there's an immediate temptation to pit it against 2022's more bombastic Elvis. And while Priscilla Presley was brushed aside in it, concerns remained this effort could still be redundant, covering much of the same ground despite its shift in focus. But what Coppola serves up instead is a more subdued, contemplative approach that's miles removed from Baz Luhrmann's flashy extravaganza. It's no better or worse an approach, just entirely different, which is probably for the best.

Less about Elvis's rise to fame and legendary career than Priscilla's challenges in living with him, this look at their complicated, volatile relationship is the first to heavily emphasize that controversial age gap, going so far as to paint The King as an abusive child groomer capable of flying off the handle at a moment's notice. And yet he manages to disarm everyone he meets, initially obscuring his worst qualities from the smitten, impressionable teen. While their union may not pass the legal or ethical sniff test, Coppola succeeds in believably showing its effects on the future and former Mrs. Presley, who silently ached to escape her husband's shadow.  

It's 1959 and 14 year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) lives with her family in West Germany, where her stepfather, Captain Beaulieu (Ari Cohen) is stationed in the military. At a party on the base, Priscilla is introduced to the recently drafted 24-year-old world famous singer Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), who takes an immediate liking to her. Flustered by his affections, they begin dating, and after some early resistance from Priscilla's parents, it isn't long before they're also won over by Elvis's manners and charm. 

Following Elvis's tour of duty, Priscilla moves to his Graceland estate in Memphis and enrolls at the local Catholic high school, where she faces increased scrutiny. Behind closed doors, he exerts control over every aspect of her life, getting hooked on prescription drugs while rumors of his alleged infidelity swirl in the tabloids. Prone to wild mood swings, his verbally and physically abusive behavior lead to Priscilla being bought off with gifts and hollow apologies. Amidst his worsening addictions, the relationship deteriorates, while she quietly yearns for a fresh start.  

That Spaeny and Elordi don't physically resemble Priscilla and Elvis in the slightest actually helps Coppola's cause since neither come across as attempting an impersonation of any sort. You even have to occasionally remind yourself who they're playing since this couple is often more intriguing than the genuine article, who always seemed just out of our reach, their true selves obscured by the media frenzy surrounding them. 

This feels like a deeper, more intelligent look at who they were as people, with an increased emphasis on Priscilla's doe eyed innocence and naivety, as Spaeny believably transforms from teen to late twenties woman over the course of the film. A relative unknown, she's a revelation in the role, conveying all the excitement, trepidation and fear that might accompany this girl's relationship with the biggest celebrity on the planet.

As recently demonstrated in Saltburn, Elordi's magnetic screen presence makes him an inspired choice for Elvis, and despite not looking like him and towering over a diminutive Spaeny, this works. If anything, it highlights the distance between them and an obviously uneven power dynamic that will only grow larger as the film progresses. And Coppola's wise enough not to have Elordi emulate Austin Butler's portrayal, tailoring this different take to the actor's specific strengths. There's also no Colonel Parker to be found in a movie where he wouldn't quite fit, his involvement limited to a briefly overheard phone call and a few passing mentions.

Elvis effortlessly impresses Priscilla's pushover parents by appealing to her father's sense of duty and respect. After dismissing everything their daughter says, one visit from him and they're completely on board with her moving to Graceland. And as much as Priscilla's vulnerability stands out against the older, experienced Elvis, his superstar status has given him a free pass to get away with a lot, and he definitely uses it.  

Leaving her small town existence behind brings a new series of challenges for Priscilla that few of any age could handle. Just as Elvis's tantrums seem to reach their crescendo, the realization hits that they're not even married yet, nor has she given birth to Lisa Marie. In other words, it'll get far worse, and while his extended absences feel like a respite, she still clings to him while struggling to craft her own separate identity. 

If Coppola's previously been accused of sacrificing substance for style, the atmosphere she, cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, production designer Tamara Deverell create with Graceland feels like an ideal balance of the two, with Priscilla hauled up in a palace of superficial beauty that doubles as her penitentiary, not unlike the setting that plagued Princess Diana in 2021's Spencer. And similarly, it isn't a single event, but rather slow, steady stream of them that break her, leading to the eventual epiphany.

Impeccably made and anchored by a tremendous star-making performance from Spaeney, Coppola again explores her go-to theme of isolated women emotionally imprisoned by the trappings of wealth and fame. But there's something that feels more coldly detached about this, zeroing in on all the right parts of Priscilla's 1985 memoir and filling the gaps with smaller, slice-of-life moments absent from other Elvis-related projects. If it's sometimes easy to agree with biopic skeptics who think we never need another take on anyone, this shows there's usually room for a new perspective that challenges those preconceived notions.                 

Review Round-up (Part I)

As promised, here are a few shortened reviews of some 2013 releases I've been catching up with in the past couple of weeks. While I'm not thrilled about doing it like this, time constraints and a massive viewing backlog have made it a necessity. More to come soon. 

Drinking Buddies (Dir. Joe Swanberg, Running time: 90 min., Rating: R)

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★) 

Give Drinking Buddies credit for this: It's real. Almost uncomfortably, amusingly and sometimes unevenly real. What it isn't is your typical romantic comedy. That alone should be cause for celebration, even if it's  a muted one considering how low-key and casual the project feels (a compliment). That much of its script was supposedly improvised isn't much of a surprise. Brewery co-workers and best friends Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) have their feelings for each other tested over a long weekend despite both being attached to significant others Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick). In terms of working and dating life in your thirties, director Joe Swanberg really has it nailed down and kudos to giving the two major characters an occupation that's actually interesting and heavily informs the narrative in an intriguing way.

The two standouts are clearly Wilde and Johnson, both of whom give Indie Spirit worthy performances and come off so naturally endearing together on camera it's impossible not to root for them to cheat (as awful as that sounds). Wilde, especially, has never palyed a character this multi-dimensional before and many will be impressed how easygoing her work is while New Girl star Johnson continues to prove himself underrated as a film actor. Kendrick and Livingston play probably the two most boring people on Earth (intentionally) so that they soldier through this unscathed is a credit to them. Many will probably groan about the non-ending but it's probably one of the more ironic and painfully authentic finishes you'll see for a rom-com, if this can even be considered that. It's more of a low-budget, character driven alternative to the monotony of standard relationship movies. And it works just fine.

Frances Ha (Dir. Noah Baumbach, Running Time: 86 min, Rating: R)

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★) 
 
"Adorkable" may be the adjective frequently used to describe another current quirky TV character, but it may actually better suit 27-year-old aspiring dancer Frances (Greta Gerwig) who's stumbling and bumbling through her heavily extended post grad-life with an offbeat sense of humor and a giant smile on her face. You can't help but pull for her, even if at times you feel as if you've entered a world not completely comprehensible unless you're on board with Noah Baumbach's black and white universe of mumblecore hipsterdom. I mostly was. It succeeds almost in spite of itself, but most entirely due to Gerwig. When her Brooklynite best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner) decides to pick up and move on with her life, the "undateable" Frances must come to terms with the fact that hers is a mess. A broke, somewhat homeless, and minimally talented dancer with few prospects, she soldiers on, crashing at the pad of creative types Lev (Adam Driver) and Benji (Michael Zegan). A visit to her parents in Cali to a trip to Paris to an attempted return to her college days upstate all mostly result in disaster. She's like a female, less talented Llewyn Davis, but lacking the depression.

It's rare to find a film and protagonist that's both so endearing and irritating at the same time. But then again, this is the guy who made The Squid and The Whale and Greenberg. Baumbach's clearly channeling Manhattan-era Woody Allen here but what's funny is how I actually enjoyed this more than anything Allen's done in the past decade (which admittedly isn't saying much). A scene with an elated Frances running down the streets with David Bowie's "Modern Love" blasting over the soundtrack is undeniably joyous. It's the one film on here I'd most quickly revisit despite being nowhere near the strongest and a mixed bag. So that says something. Baumbach's never made anything I didn't care for and this continues the streak.

Blackfish (Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite, Running Time: 83 min., Rating: PG-13)

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

There's a scene in the documentary Blackfish that's almost impossible to watch. As baby Orca whale Tilikum is captured by seaman off the coast of Iceland in 1983 with his family crying in the background. A fisherman on the expedition is interviewed, near tears as he regretfully looks back on it as his lowest moment as a human being. It's tough to argue, but he's hardly the only guilty party here. The most fascinating aspect of this doc is what should have been obvious to everyone isn't until now. Of course, keeping killer whales in in captivity and treating them like trained circus animals has to be dangerous, right? And yet we've all been conditioned by SeaWorld since youth to believe it's okay. I'm usually opposed to documentaries that take a stand for "causes" and animal activists certainly haven't been the most level-headed in the past, but this isn't a propaganda piece. The facts speak for themselves.

What we're shown is damning. From the chilling testimonials from former trainers to the horrifying actual footage of whale attacks (one escape by an experienced diver is a heart-stopper), the only question remaining at the end isn't how these whales could do this, but how they couldn't given the treatment they received.  The abused Tilikum would go on to kill two trainers, the second of whom was Dawn Brancheau in 2010. SeaWorld caused it. And then they sat on it, before blaming her. At best they're guilty of animal cruelty. At worst, they're murderers. It's a shock they're still in business, even if the release of this film justifiably puts the company's entire future in jeopardy. It's proof that documentaries can cause a serious, seismic shift in how we look at things. As for these SeaWorld executives? They should be tossed in the tank. I was surprised just how emotionally involved and outraged I felt watching it. This is documentary filmmaking in its purest, most powerful form.

The Bling Ring (Dir. Sofia Coppola, Running Time: 90 min., Rating: R)

★★★ (out of ★★★★) 

Taking its place alongside Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain and The Wolf of Wall Street, Sofia Coppola's latest is only further proof that 2013 in film will be remembered as the year of materialistic excess and social depravity. Based on real events, The Bling Ring tells the story of a group of celebrity obsessesed California teens who successfully burglarized the homes of Paris Hilton (funny), Audrina Patridge (funny), Megan Fox (still funny) Lindsay Lohan (funnier) and Rachel Bilson (not funny!) And that's pretty much the film, but it's amazing just how much mileage Coppola is able to squeeze out of it. It's supposed to be a satire, but that's not glaringly obvious, which is both its biggest strength and weakness.

There are points when you think it's entirely possible the director is enjoying herself a little too much, feeling almost too comfortable in this setting to really go for the jugular like Harmony Korine did with Spring Breakers. But there is a lot to appreciate here, starting with newcomer Katie Chang's performance as ringleader Rebecca and Israel Brussard's work as Marc, the new student sucked into her vortex and yearning for acceptance. He's really the only character with a conscience about what he's doing or comes close to gaining sympathy while Emma Watson's Nikki is by far the most detestable. It wasn't until I saw actual footage of the real person on which the character was based that I realized Watson didn't take it too far and was creepily spot-on with her vacant, airheaded portrayal.

This is the last film shot by the late, great cinematographer Harris Savides and it presents a California that's washed out, depressed and altogether atypical of how it's usually depicted on screen. You also have to appreciate that Sleigh Bells-backed opening title sequence. While I'd agree that the complaints against the film are valid and there's a certain repetitiveness to the break-ins, the hypnotic way it shines a spotlight on the ugliest side of our celebrity obsessed culture makes it a bit more compelling than its superficiality lets on.
      

Somewhere

Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Chris Pontius, Simona Ventura
Running Time: 98 min
Rating: R

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

With fewer and fewer stories left to tell, there's thankfully still many ways left to do it if you're skilled enough. Sophia Coppola's minimalist approach isn't for everyone, as single scene or shots can linger endlessly, making even the most patient viewers wonder if the film was edited at all. And that's the thing with mood pieces: You have to be in the mood to watch them. With Somewhere, Coppola favors the stripped down, bare bones style she employed in her three previous features but manages to drop the volume down even lower. Those who didn't care for The Virgin Suicides, Lost Translation or Marie Antoinette will find this even more frustrating but it deserves mention alongside them, which is to say it's very good and will likely age well. And like those, it's equally brilliant and infuriating at the same time, its flaws as endearing as its strengths. Think of it as Lost in Translation meets The Wrestler meets The Brown Bunny meets an art house version of Entourage or Californication. While she's yet to release a work as impressive as peers like Fincher, P.T. Anderson, or Aronofsky and her output's more polarizing, she's been nothing if not consistent, extracting unexpected career peak performances from the likes of Kirsten Dunst (twice), Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray. She does it again here this time with another even more unlikely suspect and again proves few are as capable of using visuals and music in a movie as effectively. All-around, it's very similar--some would say too similar--to her previous efforts, but that's fine by me.

The film follows, at least for the first couple of minutes, a black Ferrrari as it continuously laps a racetrack. Its driver is famous actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), whose solitary excursions in that car represent the only forward momentum in his life.  Hauling himself up at the famed Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where he's nursing an arm injury and doing press interviews for his latest action film with an unhappy co-star (Michelle Monaghan), we can assume from their brief, awkward interactions, he slept with at some point. Despite having booze, pills and women at his beckoned call at seemingly every hour of the day and enjoying unparalleled professional success, he's an emotional zombie giving the term "going through the motions" a whole new meaning. Bored, absent and detached, he actually falls asleep twice during his interactions with women, the first time almost inexcusably during a twin strippers' pole dancing routine set to the Foo Fighters' "My Hero" that's so compellingly, brilliantly awful it could probably wake a corpse. The unexpected arrival of his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) changes his plans, as her mother, with whom he shares custody, disappears without giving an indication as to when or if she'll return. With little choice but to bond with her, they grow closer and he must decide whether this lonely, empty lifestyle is really for him.

The startling similarities between this and Coppola's previous two films won't be lost on anyone. Once again, she returns to the central theme of loneliness and isolation in the face of fame that characterized Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. Admittedly, the hard knocks that come with being rich and famous isn't exactly the kind of topic that gets audiences on your side, but that's not her job. If this is what she knows and wants to explore then by all means she should. If she didn't actually explore it that would be a problem but this isn't a carbon copy of Lost in Translation, despite them both sharing a hotel setting and the plot of a depressed actor at a crossroads. There's actually a lot less going on here. From the opening scene right up until the end, not a lot is said, but somehow you're keyed in to exactly what's going on from moment to moment. The film's style encourages its characters, the visuals and the two central performances plenty of room to breathe, very often mimicking the aimless, trance-like state of its protagonist. Yet despite being told nothing and having to figure out this guy for ourselves, it's a strangely pressure-less experience to sit through, offering relief from the burden of being inundated by too many details. If Coppola's an expert at anything, it's letting the visuals, music and acting speak for itself. Unafraid of letting scenes linger past the point they typically should (or we're used to) to convey a mood, a practice session at an ice rink goes on twice as long as you'd expect and is all the more memorable for it.


Stephen Dorff is the perfect empty vessel, as Coppola tries to do for him what Aronofsky did for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (this film's working title could have easily been The Actor) by taking an actor's personality (or maybe lack of it) and wrapping everything else around it to fit. Maybe that wasn't the intention but Dorff's passivity is so convincing it could have fooled me. It's only speculation how much personal experience he channeled to get inside Johnny's head and while Dorff's career or life, from what we know, isn't in the dire shape Rourke's was, an artsy, meditative character study still isn't something we'd usually associate with the B-list star of Blade and Cecil B. Demented.  He ends up being pretty good at it. Elle Fanning (now a threat to surpassing her older sister as the family's breadwinner) gives Cleo a poise and intelligence beyond her years while still maintaining the naivety of a little girl faking obliviousness to her father's severe shortcomings, chipping away at his indifference. She knows what's up, and how Fanning subtly shows it is what makes the performance. The final scene is a keeper and well-earned, telling us all we need to know while leaving enough behind for us to fill in the rest.

Movies like Somewhere are the ones to watch out for because they seem at first to be inert, or worse, about "nothing," but have this way of staying with you because they end up being about much more than just their plot, which in this case is familiar.  I hate judging a director's current work against their previous efforts but it's almost impossible to view this film in any way but through the prism of her others, completing a quadrilogy of loneliness that started with The Virgin Suicides. Strangely, despite coming really close, she hasn't made a movie as compelling as that one again, but is instead effectively carving out career that builds on the themes she introduced in it in memorably divergent ways. Say what what you will about Coppola, but she's as one of the few filmmakers working today whose new releases are, for better or worse, accompanied by an "event" feeling because of their distinctive style. Somewhere meets that expectation, which is really the most that could have been asked of it.