Sofia Coppola makes beautiful movies about sad women and immature men

For her eighth full-length feature film, Priscilla, Sofia Coppola chose to adapt Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, a story of feminine languor in sympathy with Coppola’s valuable oeuvre thus far. Like the best of Coppola’s films Priscilla is not only aesthetically captivating, but offers profound insight about love to a deeply lovesick world. And I would add, Coppola’s films, and Priscilla in particular, offer worthwhile lessons for young men with unrealistic ideas of married life.

Coppola cut her teeth as an auteur in 1999 with The Virgin Suicides, a harrowing coming-of-age tale starring Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon, the most precocious of a quintet of daughters in a strict Catholic family. The film has a devastating conclusion, but it is no simplistic condemnation of religious upbringing or tight parental control. Rather, it is a young woman’s Sorrows of Young Werther—a tragic, Romantic expression of the intensity of youthful emotion. It is extreme, but extreme is normal at a certain age. To me, The Virgin Suicides offers a stark reminder to fathers and mothers of teenaged girls: We hope to God we are right when we reassure our daughters that what they’re going through is not so bad…they’ll live.

In 2003, Coppola made her masterpiece, Lost in Translation, featuring the career-making performance of Scarlett Johansson, then just seventeen years old but playing a newlywed college graduate named Charlotte. Charlotte’s photographer husband John, played by Giovanni Ribisi, has dragged her to Tokyo for work, and her sudden isolation quickly infects her whole Existenz. In every tangible respect, Charlotte is perfectly free, but utterly miserable.

When we meet Charlotte, her husband is too busy and too ambitious to pay adequate attention to his gorgeous and brilliant bride, reminding us that young men can be total idiots. But older men can be foolish too. At the end of Lost in Translation, we are reassured that Charlotte’s marriage is safe, thanks to a friendship with a famous actor (Bill Murray), whose infidelity to his wife back in the States shocks Charlotte into finally understanding how to receive love from the inevitably flawed (but not that flawed) man to whom she has pledged her faithfulness. Like The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation is hardly a patriarchy-smasher; rather, it is a specimen of something so valuable because too rare—a humane portrait of a real woman, dealing with the difficulty of real love.

Coppola’s 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette, starring her previous muse Dunst, is another film about a woman with everything but love. Coppola’s film, based on the biography by Antonia Fraser, is historically inaccurate—or at least incomplete. But, no matter; Coppola depicts the queen first as a naïve girl, then as a reckless young woman, and finally as a mature mother and wife—not too far, finally, from the abstemious, courageous, and faithful Catholic she was for many years up to the time of the French Revolution. Coppola adds obvious anachronisms, including modern rock music, which gives the film a contemporary charm that not every period piece achieves.

More than anything, Marie Antoinette is a revealing film about marriage, with the young queen coming of age in an environment as isolating and bewildering as early twenty-first century Japan is to Charlotte in Lost in Translation. The young Louis XVI is both green and absentminded, and once again, the female protagonist’s biggest problem is not abuse, but neglect—this time from a man whose royal apparatus makes him as lonely as his bride is. It is finally touching when, before the blade falls, the couple learns to share each other’s sorrows and find their home together.

Priscilla draws from The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette in various ways. The title character is an angsty teenager from a strict family. She is lonely and far from home. And she marries the king. The many sides of Priscilla’s character, from the age of fifteen to twenty-seven, are captured gracefully by the relatively unknown actress Cailee Spaeny.

As a freshman at an ex-pat high school in Germany, the pretty and petite Priscilla receives an invitation to the home of America’s most famous entertainer, Elvis Presley, who is doing his military service in between his first stint as a musical heartthrob and the next phase of his career as a matinee idol. Elvis is attracted to Priscilla because he wants something that is his, and only his. Naturally, Priscilla loves him—but so does everyone else.

Time and again, Elvis hangs up the phone dejected, resigned to a life that will never be his own, with fame and fortune as inadequate consolation. Elvis’ possession of Priscilla is obviously wrong; but here, as in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Coppola shies away from depicting a man as an obstacle in the way of a woman’s liberation. Even in the case of a child bride swept away from her family by a celebrity, the tragedy is that Elvis could not be a real man and live a life of sacrifice for a woman who adored him. Elvis wanted the idea of Priscilla, not the real Priscilla.

On this matter, men coming of age today ought to pay heed. Like the husbands in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Elvis is not depicted as a bad guy, at least not until drugs wreck his will. At first, he even appears to be a sincere gentleman, speaking frequently with Priscilla’s father, and insisting upon waiting to have sex with Priscilla until marriage. But we soon realize that Elvis’ good manners serve his own selfish purposes. The longer he puts off consummating his relationship with Priscilla, the more he can possess her as an ideal, an unreality. He can have flings with starlets and then repent of things getting “out of hand,” while Priscilla is left longing. And when the pair finally do marry and the slightest difficulty arises, Elvis tries to sell Priscilla the same bill of goods that his father and Colonel Parker have sold him—namely, do what you’re told and you’ll never want. But of course, like him, she does want.

And that’s the thing about love and marriage. It is the union of two real people with their own needs and wants. Priscilla could not remain the equivalent of a contest winner forever. She had to grow up, and she was guaranteed to develop her own identity, whether Elvis liked it or not. When his fantasy fell apart, he simply gave up—again, not a wicked person, but a coward. And to my eyes, the failure of Elvis’ and Priscilla’s marriage as Coppola depicts it rests on a deficiency in the consents from the beginning—on grown-up Elvis’ side more than the barely legal Priscilla’s.

Younger Catholic viewers may notice how Priscilla presents a woman’s rightful needs in marriage in ways that contrast with certain tradbro expectations. I unfortunately discovered on social media the other day a ludicrous guide for single men called “Dump Her!” authored by a particularly officious, minor Catholic influencer. The document features a series of traits, activities, beliefs, and opinions that traditionalist Catholic men are told to use as a test for whether a young woman would make a suitable bride. To the unsuspecting social media scroller, it would easily be mistaken for satire. Grounds for dumping include “owns pants,” “votes,” and “got fat,” but also the more esoteric “wanted to free Brittany,” “listens to male, Catholic women’s prophet podcasts,” and “gluten-free/high maintenance diet.” This is just the top layer of the landfill.

The idea that the married author of “Dump Her!” found a woman to take him is truly amazing. But my concern is that some men will read it, realize it’s silly, but still think there may be something right in the presumption that a man can nip in the bud anything and everything that could, in his opinion, produce bad fruit in a Christian marriage. Or worse, a good-natured young woman might read it and wrongly think herself deficient.

The truth is, you really don’t know whom you’re marrying—or at any rate, you really don’t know who that person will become in five, ten, or fifty years. Because you don’t know who you’ll become. As a man who has been married almost eighteen years, I could never have imagined my wife and I would each change the way we have. Because of this mystery—not in spite of it—I am more grateful for my wife and our life together every day. I like to think that our realistic expectations for each other and genuine concern for each other’s needs have brought about basically good results. It is a joy to remember we are bound not because we checked the right boxes on a list, but because we took vows.

Women and men alike: Watch Priscilla for an alluring, cautionary tale.