The concept, I thought, was perfect: take the old story of an 18th century Queen reviled the world over for her aristocracy and arrogance, throw in the lavish setting of Versailles and add a sprinkling of 80’s pop hits for good measure. How could such an interesting premise go so terribly wrong?
Several ways, as it turns out.
As the movie begins, young Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is literally stripped away from her Austrian home and introduced to her future husband, Louis XVI (an entertainingly awkward Jason Schwartzman). From that point on, Coppola seems to be trying hard to give the historical icon what amounts to a real life- to portray her as a human being, a child, really, stuck in the isolated fantasy land of the French court. The first scenes of the movie accomplish this well, passing the naïve Marie Antoinette through seemingly pointless rituals and gossiping court members (one played, oddly enough, by Molly Shannon). As Marie Antoinette ages, however, her character fails to develop in any interesting sort of way. Marie Antoinette parties, Marie Antoinette shops, and in the end, Marie Antoinette acts about as interesting as a Hilton sister at the Palms Hotel in Vegas (complete with sex scandal).
The moral of the movie amounts to, after an excruciatingly long 123 minutes, the fact that spoiled rich girls of the 18th century aren’t very much different than the spoiled rich girls we can find today splashed between the pages of US Weekly. Trade Marie Antoinette’s signature blonde bouffant for straight-edge bangs and enormous bug-eyed sunglasses, and the similarities are uncanny. Half the movie seems to be demonstrating this one, fairly uninteresting point. Party scene after party scene, shopping scene after shopping scene- all set to the background of Bananarama- it gets old before the movie is even a quarter of the way through
The biggest misstep of the movie seems to be, that while Kirsten Dunst does make Marie Antoinette seem more like a human being and less like the evil, unfeeling aristocrat that history has portrayed her as, she doesn’t depict the young queen as having an iota of an interesting thought in her head. Marie Antoinette comes off, throughout the entire span of the movie, as an utter moron. We feel more likely to mock her than sympathize with her, and it becomes entirely clear why the starving French mobs took their aggression out on this fluffy, silly, isolated-from-reality queen. As my friend Raha put it once the credits started rolling: “we sat through all that, and we don’t even get to see her beheaded?” So it appears that, 230+ years later, Marie Antoinette still hasn’t built up much of a fan base.
There are a few redeeming qualities in “Marie Antoinette”, however. The backdrop of Versailles is fantastically beautiful, to an almost unreal degree. And the wardrobes of the gossipy, bickering duchesses and princesses put the tube tops of today’s Tara Rieds to shame. The tone of the movie doesn’t reach the heartbreaking dreaminess of, say, “The Virgin Suicides”, but it does come close once or twice. There is a scene where Marie and her cohorts, drunk on champagne, run through the gardens of Versailles to watch the sunrise and we can see them for the sweetly innocent children that they are. These are the scenes the audience can connect with- the scenes that blur the lines between the characters on the screen and our own hazy memories of being a teenager. These moments, however, are few and far between.
What “Marie Antoinette” amounts to is a overlong chick flick with a decent soundtrack- and this wouldn’t be so terribly bad, except that what the movie wants to be is an arty, controversial depiction of another country’s icon. The movie takes itself very seriously, but from the first time Kirsten Dunst giggles and tries on a pair of Manolo Blahniks, the audience never can.
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