Typically, although, the songs really feel chosen to evoke commonplace cultural perceptions of the Nineteen Sixties. When Priscilla and Elvis first fall for one another, Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover” scores their budding romance; when Priscilla strikes to Los Angeles to seek out herself aside from her marriage, she cruises in a convertible to Santana’s “Oye Como Va.”
On some degree, Coppola is intentionally making an attempt to deconstruct the cliches of cultural nostalgia—the movie opens with the Ramones’ cowl of the Ronettes “Child, I Love You”—however these sorts of music selections usually simply find yourself feeling like cliches themselves. At this level, “Crimson & Clover” is up there with “Lucky Son” or “For What’s It Value” as lazy musical time markers. (Coppola herself even used a Joan Jett cowl of “Crimson & Clover” earlier this yr in a whiskey business starring Keanu Reeves.)
It’s simple to see why Coppola might need a private connection to the story of a lady residing in a well-known shadow. Whereas she has lengthy been a name-brand auteur in her personal proper, she has additionally been compelled to show herself in opposition to the male artists in her life: her father Francis Ford Coppola, in fact, but in addition former companions like Spike Jonze. And very like the Presley household, the Coppola clan is now a model unto itself—after years of field workplace flops and a number of bankruptcies within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, Francis Ford Coppola secured his monetary and inventive independence by turning his final identify into a way of life firm, placing his auteurist stamp on every little thing from wine to pasta to pre-rolls. Sofia herself is one thing of a residing emblem, the uncommon filmmaker with an official line of T-shirts from Uniqlo.
There’s clearly one thing of Sofia on this story, however it’s exhausting to not get the sensation that she’s holding herself again with Priscilla—or maybe that she was held again by the dangers concerned with such a legally protected legacy. Like Elvis late in his profession, recording songs he had little funding in, Priscilla feels too rehearsed, with a cautious distance from the fabric. Whereas the film is a testomony to a lady’s quest to outline herself past a person, it feels remarkably disinterested in Priscilla’s life outdoors of Elvis.
In fact, that’s the topic of the movie—how males can management ladies’s lives till they’re utterly hollowed-out. However Priscilla ends simply when it’s getting most fascinating, when Priscilla has to reckon with Elvis as a cultural icon and a enterprise machine past herself, as she’s accomplished for many years in actual life as a custodian of his model. Because it was for Priscilla, the shadow of Elvis is simply an excessive amount of for Coppola to beat, a too-big-to-fail legend who turned every little thing he touched into his personal private property.
