Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia is a slick writer-director who specializes in lavishly decorated, empty-headed biopics about lavishly decorated, empty-headed people, i.e. Marie Antoinette and now Priscilla Presley.
Since we already had the surprisingly fact-filled Baz Luhrmann epic Elvis last year, there isn’t much more to say about the chicken-lickin’ backwoods hillbilly with the palpitating pelvis that hasn’t been said already, so Coppola’s aptly-named Priscilla proves it by making Elvis a secondary character and concentrating on his child bride instead.
Based on her one-dimensional book Elvis and Me, the movie is a superficial chronicle of minutiae in the life of a naive girl, blinded by phony illusions of glamour, longing for affection from a child-man who never grew up, and trapped behind closed doors of toxic fame from Hollywood to Graceland. In the darkness beyond the klieg lights, it wasn’t much of a life—and it’s not much of a movie, either