ALSO SHOWING
Priscilla (15)
★★
With Priscilla, Sofia Coppola is so committed to delivering a formalistically rigorous portrait of Priscilla Presley’s troubled and troubling relationship with Elvis it seems churlish to complain about the film itself being a little dull – but that’s what it is.
Neither a scathing post #Metoo take-down of “the King” nor a particularly deep character study of a teenager groomed from the age of 14 to become his doll-like wife, it is, instead, another of Coppola’s dramatically inert explorations of life in a gilded cage, a creative obsession that reached its zenith with her masterful Lost in Translation and poppy Marie Antionette, but has seen her go round in circles ever since, detouring only briefly with the gossamer-lite Bill Murray vehicle On the Rocks.
Cailee Spaeny is, nevertheless, well cast as Priscilla, the army kid who finds herself shellshocked by the weird reality of her relationship with rock ’n’ roll’s first white superstar after being airdropped in from the frontlines of fandom to alleviate his loneliness (they first meet when he’s doing his military service in Germany).
Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi is also fine as Elvis, playing him as a shy, physically imposing man-child, feeding her the same uppers and downers he’s already necking day and night, and fetishising her innocence as he attempts to mould her into his ideal woman.
The film isn’t all that interested in positing who that ideal woman might be – his recently deceased mama? A substitute for his stillborn twin? A female simulacrum of himself? – preferring instead to languish over the tarnished surface details of Priscilla’s world, the chintzy claustrophobia of Graceland in particular.
Too much of it, though, plays like an elliptically rendered adaptation on the couples’ Wikipedia page, unadorned with melodramatic incident, but also devoid of anything that might hold our interest. Even Priscilla’s post-marriage loss of virginity – a key moment the film seems to be building towards – is dispensed with in such wispy fashion it’s impossible to know how she feels about it one way or another. Coppola’s desire to tell the story of a teenage girl waking up to the sad reality of a dream that came true may be an admirable one, but the whole film is so vague, so unwilling to offend, it barely makes an impression.
General release
One Life (PG)
★★★
In dramatising the story of Nicholas Winton, the modest London stockbroker who organised the evacuation of 669 mostly Jewish children from Prague in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War, it’s a shame One Life couldn’t find a way to keep the story focused on him in his later life.
As played by Anthony Hopkins, his remarkable story has significantly more emotional heft than in the flashback scenes depicting him as a young man horrified by the situation he witnesses on a visit to Prague to help some friends organise visas for political dissidents (Johnny Flynn plays the younger Winton).
Whenever it cuts away from Hopkins’ subtle, generous turn showing the retired Nicholas trying to figure out what to do with his extensive archive detailing his work, it starts to play like any run-of-themill Sunday night wartime TV drama – ironic, since Winton’s deeds came to light late in his life when they were featured on a very famous episode of the strange, Esther Rantzen-fronted consumer affairs show That’s Life!
The film inevitably builds to that moment, but it’s Hopkins’ face, the way it seems to carry Nicholas’s guilt and regret at not being able to save even more children, that gives it a power and a depth absent from the script’s on-the-nose worthiness.
General release