Did the World Really Need Another Movie About Elvis Presley?
Protestations to the side about Sofia Coppola’s ‘Priscilla’ being about the pop idol’s wife, the film tells us more about Elvis’s wants, needs, and failings than it does about its title character.
In an interview with Vogue magazine a little more than a year ago, the director Sofia Coppola mentions that taking on “Priscilla,” her new movie based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 book “Elvis and Me,” was done as a “pivot” away from an Edith Wharton adaptation that was proving burdensome. Wanting to make “one film with one idea,” Ms. Coppola likened Ms. Presley’s experience as a teenager coming of age within the “amplified world” of Elvis Presley as “kinda similar to Marie Antionette.”
Ms. Coppola, you might remember, helmed “Marie Antionette” (2006), a picture released to mixed reviews, though critics in France found much to recommend within its fast-and-loose historical parameters. Some opinion makers stateside took the film to task for a soundtrack that was largely ahistorical, wondering if songs by post-punk musicians like the Cure, Bow Wow Wow, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and New Order were suitable for evoking the resplendent environs and political machinations of 17th-century Versailles.
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