Priscilla, as a movie about the woman and not The King, not only has a noticeable dearth of Elvis songs but also assumes you know an awful lot about the guy coming in. Perhaps too much…. I can imagine someone young enough to not know all the details being confused by the passing mentions of things going on outside of Priscilla’s orbit. Which is kind of the point… and yet it leaves a huge hole that makes the film a little unreachable.

The flick stars Cailee Spaeny as the 14 year old girl an older Jacob Elordi meets and woos. Discomfort abounds but at least we’re given a solid few extra years before the hound dog comes sniffing around again. They get together and the film skips across her life like a stone.

Cailee Spaeny does a fine job playing the uncomfortably young version of Priscilla and manages to grow older convincingly. She never doesn’t look like the isolated, emotionally abused, closed-off girl and woman she’s playing. She’s so good as a doormat that it tends to frustrate… but that’s the point.

I don’t know Jacob Elordi but, of all the men who have played Elvis over the years, he’s certainly one of them. I didn’t find him convincing… he’s a little too model pretty and his twang never fit his face. And I never once bought him in his carbohydrate, sequined-jumpsuit, young-girls-in-white-cotton-panties, waking-up-in-a-pool-of-his-own-vomit, bloated-purple-dead-on-a-toilet phase, either.

The film is confident and gauzy and wafts from incident to incident in Priscilla’s trap of her own making. We never spend long in any one sequence and never really get to know her or the people in her orbit all that well. Spaeny’s eyes and Coppola’s shots do most of the talking and that creates a certain distance between viewer and subject… intentionally so, I imagine.

Certainly we get an impression of Elvis through her eyes. Coppola has not come her to praise The King, but to bury him. I imagine this is why the Elvis estate isn’t happy with the film… and why we don’t get much of his music either.

I’m a little distracted and unsure about how much I like this flick. I appreciated it more than I actively enjoyed it… and there’s much to be appreciated in a cold, distant, and beautiful Sophia Copolla sort of way.

Score: 80