Outside of her starring in the Naked Gun comedy movies, I didn’t know too much about Priscilla Presley going into the new Sophia Coppola directed biopic Priscilla. And while I held my breath to see who would play Leslie Nielson when they got to the Naked Gun time in her life, I should have known that since the movie was based on her memoir titled Elvis and Me, that Priscilla would focus only on her relationship with the King of Rock n Roll.
It starts off with the 14 year old titular character hanging out at a malt shop in a 1959 German air force base. As fate would have it, she’s stationed at the same base as Private Elvis Presley. A homesick Elvis finds himself infatuated with her underage innocence. The feeling is mutual and the film oozes with that dreamy, teenage Sophia Coppola lens.
It doesn’t take long for the audience to realize Elvis is a maniac. Not quite Ike Turner level. Elvis never lays a hand on Priscilla. But he is pushing pills and as controlling as Colonel Tom Parker was in Elvis’ own biopic. When Elvis is not out raising hell with his boys or in the papers for fooling around with Ann-Margaret, he is chastising Priscilla for not sharing his interests.
I assume it was intentional that they cast two actors with such a height discrepancy. In real life Elvis was six feet flat and Priscilla was 5’4″. Cailee Spaeny, the actress who plays Priscilla is under five feet. Jacob Elordi, the actor who plays Elvis is listed as 6’5″. He towers over her. It gives the effect of Priscilla Presley as a toy doll in a land of giants.
Priscilla plays just as loose and fast with the passage of time as it does with size.
A sleeping pill makes two days pass in the blink of an eye. The 1970’s are here before you realize it. The incongruities makes Priscilla feel often like a movie you’d see playing in a bar with the sound off with random music playing on the speakers. It’s beautifully photographed and smartly soundtracked. Whether you want to rush out to see this movie in a theater depends on how lenient you are on whether a movie has a functional story or not. I was more than content to watch a two hour mood piece. And I’ll hold out hope that they make a part 2 chronicling the Naked Gun years.
Killers of the Flower Moon
When I heard Martin Scorsese helmed a three and a half hour film in Killers of the Flower Moon, I was hoping for a sprawling America defining epic like The Godfather or The Deer Hunter. But unfortunately the only thing Killers of the Flower Moon has in common with those classics is a bladder punishing running time.
Flower Moon starts off great with beautiful cinematography of Native Americans striking it rich being showered with oil. There’s then newsreel footage of how the Osage tribe of Oklahoma were among the richest people in the world in the 1920’s. When Leonardo DiCaprio comes into town, to some bluesy music, you think this is going to be a movie. DiCaprio is no longer the pretty boy of his youth, but he still has plenty of that movie star charisma to spare. He makes every scene interesting, no matter how much the script fails him.
There’s a lot to like about Flower Moon. Every shot is fantastic. The town that they built looks amazing. But like Priscilla, Flower Moon doesn’t have any structure. While Priscilla leans into that choice, Flower Moon feels more meandering and unsure of what it wants to be.
You like FBI procedurals? Ok two and a half hours in we’ll introduce an investigation. You like courtroom movies? Ok, three hours in we’ll have a trial. All that was missing in this movie, set before running water was commonplace, was a kitchen sink.
But it could have been worse. The first cut was supposedly over four hours. I suppose the missing 30 minutes could have fleshed things out, so things could have been more cohesive. Maybe Robert DeNiro’s bad guy, who is the biggest flaw in the film could have been rounded out with a little more nuance, but it seems like over 200 minutes should have been enough time to figure out what this movie wanted to be.
