'Priscilla' Confronts a Creepy Elvis

Try as we might, to ignore the autobiographical elements of Sofia Coppola’s films requires a formidable, if not counterintuitive, effort in critical restraint. Her screen debut came before her first birthday, in the climactic sequence of her father’s masterpiece, an allegory of American capitalism wherein her staged baptism, as a male heir of the Corleone crime family, reinforces the theme of generational power and wealth, an inheritance doomed by violence and pride. Eighteen years later, playing the beloved daughter of Al Pacino’s Michael, she is shot dead on the steps of the opera house in Palermo, taking a bullet meant for the belatedly penitent godfather, who now comprehends without any doubt that there is no escaping the sins of his or his relatives’ past.