Glass Half Full
Coppola looks at the other side of fame, stripping away Presley’s aura as she presents events from his young bride’s POV. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is an anti-Elvis, all boyish moodiness and very little charisma. It’s a pared back performance which carefully deconstructs the myth, with Priscilla given centre stage. Her evolution from child bride to emancipated woman is convincingly rendered and one senses the director’s own journey from being a cog in the Coppola machine to becoming her own woman and director shadowing the film’s narrative.
Glass Half Empty
Coppola’s uneasy film, which seems to have been deliberately stripped of emotion in a flat, monotone edit, never really comes to the boil. Seeking to tell the abusive story of Elvis’ child bride, railroaded into a claustrophobic world which is controlled by Elvis, his father, and the absent Colonel Parker, the film never engages fully with the conflict or abuse inherent to her situation. The film suffers from moments of arch cliché, such as the sequence where Priscilla and Elvis take a hackneyed LSD trip, scored by suitably ‘Indian’ music, or the predictable closing scenes. In the end, for all its endeavour, Priscilla falls into the biopic trap of trying to tell too much in too short a span of time, something which the director attempts to paper over with various lukewarm montage sequences. The desire to show Elvis as a proto-monster but also a loveable poet leads to a muddy, vacillating narrative which feels as though it can never quite make up its mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment