Going Around in Circles, Disjointed ‘On Swift Horses’ Is Frustrating Misdirect

Going Around in Circles, Disjointed ‘On Swift Horses’ Is Frustrating Misdirect

By Lynn Venhaus

Pretty people and sun-dappled scenery wind up being ineffective in a shallow head-scratcher, “On Swift Horses,” a stagnant 1950s melodrama heavy on turgid soap opera and light on authentic emotion.

Two card sharks, a freedom-yearning woman from Kansas, and a traditional breadwinner in the 1950s seek the suburban American Dream after the Korean War. While their lives intersect, they are actually very far apart in their wants, needs and desires.

Trying to imitate Douglas Sirk’s lush films from that era, director Daniel Minahan’s queer period piece addresses how homosexuals had to remain closeted during a very repressed and cookie-cutter time but fails to connect in any meaningful way.

An example of style over substance, this is the kind of film where chain-smoking cigarettes substitute for pensive thoughts and inner torment. And they all live in the shadows.

Sirk, who made “Magnificent Obsession,” “All That Heaven Allows,” “Written on the Wind,” and “Imitation of Life” from 1954 to 1959, captured attractive people who were trapped by social conditions, and his overwrought stories appealed because his filming featured splendid cinematic set pieces, and matinee idols like Rock Hudson and Lana Turner.

With such well-regarded performers as Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi and Will Poulter in what you may think is a seductive love triangle (trailer is a misdirect), one hoped they’d make us care about their journeys, but the story fails to provide reasons to be interested in what happens.

The trio is built up to appear “longing,” only they smolder and do not ignite. This disjointed adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel by screenwriter Bryce Kass is overstuffed, not satisfying with basics. Neither did his lackluster “Lizzie” in 2018, which did not go far enough in fleshing out accused ax murderer Lizzie Borden.

Sure, they are a tempting pair, Elordi and Edgar-Jones, but do their character’s mutual connection benefit either? They spend most of their time in separate turmoil, with only a few scenes together.ccc

Oh, the trio try for big emotions, but it’s dialed down, as they speak in hushed tones and move around in scenes lit in such moody, murky atmospheres that it is almost too dark, so that is aggravating. Now, the stylish costumes designed by Jeriana San Juan, and distinct make-up and hairstyles are fabulous, but that can’t be the only selling point.

Muriel (Edgar-Jones) chafes at convention – doomed to be a typical wife in post-war America although she reluctantly attempts to fit in — while brothers Lee (Poulter) and Julius (Elordi) are Korean War veterans. The film starts in 1952 but it’s not clear how much time passes.

These young adults have different goals and desires, but fumble badly in their communication with each other. Lee talks in code about his wayward, secretive brother Julius who is always flirting with the wild side. “He has passions of his own. He’s just not like us,” he tells his wife.

The handsome Julius is a smooth gambler and gay hustler who falls in love with Henry (Diego Calva) while working in Las Vegas. Much of the interaction doesn’t feel genuine, and lack of convincing chemistry is an issue.

However, Elordi and Edgar-Jones have a spark when Julius and Muriel meet, becoming pen pals and share some, but not all, of their secrets. Don’t think this is going anywhere because it’s not.

At the diner she works at, Muriel overhears customers talking about their picks for the racetrack, so she starts playing the ponies with those tips. It’s a thrill for her to win and live a double life, stashing away the cash without her husband’s knowledge.

Lee, a total straight arrow who loves his wife and desperately wants the fantasy suburban life including a ranch house in a subdivision that signals middle-class prosperity. Developers are buying up farms and fields in San Diego for the “Baby Boom.”

One of the neighboring farms where Muriel purchases eggs and takes a shine to olives – and the woman selling them, Sandra (Sasha Calle). They become entangled in a clandestine affair.

Those hiding secrets are on a collision course for crash-and-burns, but whether you want to invest in their mess depends on how impatient you feel, for the pace is sluggish and resolutions are prolonged. And why does it take nearly 2 hours to tell this insipid story?

I fret that Elordi, promising as Elvis in “Priscilla” and as the rich golden-boy Felix in “Saltburn,” is a one-trick pony, destined to be the bad boy with the sad eyes. Let’s hope not, because he’s playing Heathcliff to Margot Robbie’s Catherine in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic gothic novel “Wuthering Heights,” due out next year.

Poulter, who seems to be everywhere these days, recently in “Warfare” and “Death of a Unicorn,” is saddled with an underdeveloped character and being boxed in as the cuckolded husband. And would you believe he and Elordi are brothers?

After taking risks, Edgar-Jones’ character is mired in blandness. The actress, feisty in last year’s “Twisters” and superb in “Where the Crawdads Sing,” makes Muriel sympathetic but needed to give her more dimension. It’s a letdown.

Tell us something we don’t know and would like to know and not foist half-baked performative junk at us and call it alluring. “On Swift Horses” goes in circles and limps to the finish line with a clumsy ending that doesn’t answer any questions raised. It’s a safe bet you can skip this gussied-up charade.

“On Swift Horses” is a 2025 drama directed by Daniel Minahan and starring Jacob Elordi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Will Poulter, Diego Calva and Sasha Calle. Its run time is 1 hour, 57 minutes, and it’s rated R for sexual content, nudity and some language. It opens in theatres April 25. Lynn’s Grade: D+

Coppola’s ‘Priscilla’ Presents Elvis Romance as Surreal Teenage Dream

Coppola’s ‘Priscilla’ Presents Elvis Romance as Surreal Teenage Dream

By Lynn Venhaus

Women of privilege but not power in a male-dominated world has been a theme in other Sofia Coppola films, and “Priscilla” fits that mold in its look at the heavily documented superstar life of The King of Rock ‘n Roll, but from his sheltered bride’s perspective.

More style than substance, “Priscilla” could be considered a companion piece to last year’s flashier, bolder “Elvis,” and presents snapshots of the Presleys’ relationship, only hinting at deeper issues instead of delving into them.

That keeps the pair at arm’s length, meaning we don’t invest emotionally – although the performers convey believable characters. Portraying the sweet, naïve Priscilla Beaulieu, Cailee Spaeny is a stunner in a breakthrough role. As the sultry superstar, Jacob Elordi, as he has done as the bad-boy jock in “Euphoria,” implies a complexity to the singer-matinee idol that isn’t explored.

Yet, the movie is named after the homesick schoolgirl who was thrust into an intoxicating whirlwind romance that she was incapable of understanding because of her not-fully-formed emotional development (and his). After all, he was 24 and she was 14 when they met while he was stationed in the Army in Germany and her stepfather was an officer. If you fast forward 60 years later, and the couple never would have survived today’s harsh social media scrutiny.

Whether intentionally or not, Elvis doesn’t come across in the best light if we’re looking through a modern lens. Did he groom her and take advantage of an underage girl? Or were feelings pure and the connection on a different level?

But, of course, their era was a very different time in gender politics. They were married from 1967 to 1973, first meeting in 1959. After Elvis’s death in 1977,at age 42, Priscilla took over the reins of his legacy, and became generally regarded as a savvy businesswoman. She also had an acting career, most notably in “The Naked Gun” movies and on TV’s “Dallas.”

Elvis Presley Enterprises, which represents the trust and the physical estate Graceland, denied using his music catalogue for the film. Priscilla is the co-founder and former chairperson, and serves as an executive producer of this film. Music supervisor Phoenix is left to needle-drops of the time period.

In a moody, evocative way, benefitting from cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd’s lens, writer-director Coppola has created a fairy-tale fantasy, where an impressionable girl lives a surreal teenage dream. Elvis treats the dainty teenager like a doll, making sure she dresses in a certain way and creating her look according to his specifications.

Coppola has mined this point of view before, as the phrase “women in a gilded cage” has been used to describe her previous films – “The Virgin Suicides,” “Somewhere,” and “Marie Antoinette.” Coppola can and has defied expectations, for she followed up a widely panned acting turn in “The Godfather Part III” as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary in 1990 with “The Virgin Suicides” in 1999, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2003’s “Lost in Translation.”

Similar to what happens to Cinderella and the handsome prince (“I was raised to be charming, not sincere”) when reality sets in during the second act of “Into the Woods,” we view a paradise lost. You can feel Priscilla’s crushing loneliness while she attends an all-girls Catholic high school in Memphis and “keeps the home fires burning” at Graceland while he was touring or making movies or hanging with his TCB entourage. The suffocating oppression is as obvious as Xanadu in “Citizen Kane” yet the film barely touches the surface of the corrupting over-indulgence.

The production design by Tamara Deverell, who has worked on several of Guillermo del Toro’s films, is meticulous in its gaudy, retro stylings of Graceland and the high life in Las Vegas. Costume designer Stacey Battat has created marvelous vintage looks for every character, but her work dressing Priscilla is exquisite in its array of colors, textures, and tiny details.

Spaeny, who played the teen who went missing in “Mare of Easttown” and has been in minor roles, shows how that isolation manifests in her character, and how she transforms from a blank slate into what Elvis wanted and expected in a wife.

At 6’ 5”, Elordi is a striking Elvis, and conveys a more human side of the legend we think we know. While a lavish lifestyle is depicted, he portrays the King as a country boy trying to navigate the pitfalls of fame whose ego has a hard time shaking off slights. He’s attempting to live up to an image he thinks he should – wine, women, song – while compartmentalizing his home life.

It would have been interesting to address more of Priscilla’s side, as she finally gets enough gumption to leave, but the film ends abruptly – just as Priscilla is coming into her own as a person. She was 28 then.

The source material is Priscilla’s memoir “Elvis and Me” from 1986, which recalls the intimate details of their private life while living a very public lifestyle. The movie indicates nuggets of truth behind the tabloid rumors, and refers to, but glosses over, his peccadillos.

But the biggest omission is getting a sense that the two had an unbreakable bond that continued after his death, which Priscilla has maintained.

While fascinating, “Priscilla” is an incomplete work, and needed more to fill in the blanks.

“Priscilla” is a 2023 biographical drama-romance, written and directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen and Dagmara Dominczyk. It is rated R for drug use and some language, and runs 1 hour, 50 minutes. It opened in theaters November 3. Lynn’s Grade: B-

‘Priscilla’ Is An Atmospheric Look at a Troubled Relationship

‘Priscilla’ Is An Atmospheric Look at a Troubled Relationship

By Alex McPherson

Stylistically resonant with absorbing performances from Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, director Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” is emotionally removed, eschewing a deeper dive into its subject’s headspace for dreamlike stasis with little payoff and, ultimately, not much of note to say.

Based on the book “Elvis and Me” by Priscilla Presley (who also executive-produced the film), Coppola’s adaptation charts the whirlwind romance between young Priscilla (Spaeny) and the insecure, hip-gyration-loving King of Rock and Roll himself (Elordi). We’re introduced to 14-year-old Priscilla (then Beaulieu) in 1959, when she’s a high school student living with her parents (Ari Cohen and Dagmara Dominczyk) on a U.S. Air Force Base in Wiesbaden, Germany. A chance encounter at a diner leads to her being invited to a house party hosted by 24-year-old Elvis, who’s currently serving in the Army.

Priscilla is thrilled and, after battling her anxious, apprehensive parents, is allowed to attend. Once she arrives at the party in Bad Nauheim, which the film frames like a moody jazz club radiating from the powerful man at its center, Elvis (again, 10 years Priscilla’s senior) almost immediately falls for her; she reminds him of home. 

Thus begins their deeply problematic courtship. Elvis leaves Germany for The States, which tears the crestfallen Priscilla apart: she spends her days anxiously awaiting letters and calls, daydreaming through classes and growing increasingly jealous hearing about Elvis’s tabloid headlines involving other women. In 1963, she’s summoned to Graceland, indulging in extravagance (and prescription drugs, instigated by Elvis) with his posse of rowdy friends who became known as the Memphis Mafia. 

After returning to Germany, she and Elvis convince her parents to let her move to Graceland to finish her senior year of high school. Everything seems like a fairy tale in Priscilla’s eyes, at least at the beginning, but deep cracks begin to form in their relationship. Denied intimacy and manufactured to be Elvis’s porcelain doll of a wife, Priscilla is sapped of independence – trapped in a glossy cage with an emotionally unintelligent artist grappling with his own identity at the expense of hers, until she decides that she’s had enough.

Indeed, “Priscilla” is a depressingly bleak look at a relationship steeped in toxic behaviors and feelings of claustrophobia. While Coppola effectively conveys the story’s saddening atemporality, in which Priscilla’s lack of development reflects her captor’s attempts to mold her, the intentionally distant approach backfires. The film jumps erratically through time without meaningful buildup to Priscilla’s rebellion, or, oddly, real insight into who she is and hopes to be.

The performances, however, are difficult to fault, even when delivering Coppola’s occasionally clunky dialogue. Spaeny precisely embodies Priscilla’s wide-eyed youthfulness and growing maturity. We observe her longing, euphoria, and disillusionment with a celebrity she’s idealized and who has trapped her in cycles of loving and abuse, tenderness and chaos. “Priscilla” is largely framed through her eyes, as we watch her enduring situations where others talk at her and she, often nonverbally, emotes multitudes through subtle facial expressions and body language. Stacy Battat’s costume design further helps emphasize Priscilla’s separation from her past and from her true self, fashioned to appease Elvis’s demands. Her frustration and yearning is efficiently portrayed by an actor deserving of all the accolades (hopefully) headed her way.

Elordi is similarly effective, taking a far different approach than Austin Butler’s flamboyant (and highly entertaining) turn in Baz Luhrman’s 2022 biopic, “Elvis.” Elordi nails Elvis’s voice and physique, towering over Spaeny in an on-the-nose reminder of their age gap and power dynamic. Elordi’s Elvis is charismatic, trouble-making, and selfish, a victim of stardom grappling with his own image and expectations forced on him by people like Colonel Tom Parker. 

While “Priscilla” is more focused on his direct interactions (or lack thereof) with Priscilla, we infer outside drama and betrayal through conversations Priscilla overhears and headlines she reads. The victimization and mental struggles that Elvis experiences seep into his personal life. He might love Priscilla on some level, but sees her as someone to be controlled. Elvis holds her back to retain her purity, perhaps as a way for him to appease his own regrets and status as a sex symbol while he lives a life of stardom singing and acting in Hollywood (sleeping with many women along the way).

With such committed performances from Spaeny and Elordi, it’s a shame that “Priscilla” is such a cold viewing experience – which might be the point. This is a dark story of fantasy brought down to earth, less about empowerment than disempowerment. 

The film’s first half unfolds like a dream, hazy and ethereal, as Sarah Flack’s editing conveys the whirlwind romance with a sense of inertia that Priscilla finds difficult to break free from. What starts out as unexpected, surprising, and thrilling devolves into tedious cycles of mistreatment and placation. We feel for Priscilla, mostly thanks to Spaeny’s acting, but the film’s second half sags due to Coppola’s seeming refusal to dig deeper into Priscilla’s psyche; more based on vibes than genuine insight as the years tick by and Priscilla becomes a bride and mother. 

Frequent Coppola collaborator Philippe Le Sourd’s cinematography is murky and cloudy, echoing Priscilla’s stagnation – never drawing too much attention to Tamara Deverell’s period-accurate set design. Coppola frequently resorts to montages to depict the passing years, emphasizing how little has changed in Priscilla’s fraught situation.

This minimalist approach to Priscilla’s rebellion is muted to a fault. There’s little crescendo to her final decision, besides viewers knowing from the outset that she eventually divorces Elvis. As a result, Coppola’s restrained approach to the material seems like checking off boxes instead of organically telling a story about one woman’s resilience in the face of adversity. The reasons Priscilla continues to stay with Elvis are complex and worthy of exploration, though the film holds her at arm’s length. 

Combined with a jarringly abrupt ending and a soundtrack that too often tries to sell emotions through lyrics (with no Elvis tunes in the lineup), “Priscilla” stays afloat thanks to the magnetic performances of its two leads. For Spaeny and Elordi, especially Spaeny, “Priscilla” is worth a look, but it remains a missed opportunity for a filmmaker capable of greatness.

“Priscilla” is a 2023 drama directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, and Dagmara Dominczyk. It is rated R for drug use and some language, and runs 1 hour, 50 minutes. It opened in theaters November 3. Alex’s Grade: B-