Review of Marie Antoinette (2006) by Markb. — 11 Dec 2006

The apple really doesn't fall far from the tree. Sofia Coppola's films feature all the visual richness and splendor that her dad's are acclaimed for, but thus far in her career she's managed to nimbly avoid the eye-candy-for-candy's-sake tendencies of Francis Ford's more pointlessly indulgent efforts (Bram Stoker's Dracula, One From The Heart).

Her Lost In Translation very effectively used the bigness of modern-day commercial Japan as both backdrop and agent to American visitor Bill Murray's loneliness and disorientation (which is why viewers who waited for the DVD didn't "get it", were invariably disappointed and essentially cheated themselves by not seeing it on a movie screen).

It's a given, then, that Marie Antoinette is going to be a visual feast, with every frame more ravishing than the last, but those familiar with Ms. Coppola's work should also already know going in how much more there is to it than just a succession of gorgeous pictures: the director is, without precisely apologizing for the Queen of France's historic notoriety, endeavoring to place it in context by presenting her as anything but in control of anything except the most superficial aspects of her environment.

Like Pu Yi in Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece The Last Emperor, Marie is totally and impenetrably insulated from the people she's supposed to be ruling. Every detail of her life is as stringently regulated and supervised as Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984; Ms.

Coppola brings this home in scene after scene, none more poignant than the ones in which the queen, intensely vulnerable and noticeably freezing, is undressed before the court. If Hollywood stars think (usually accurately) that OUR tabloid culture denies them any semblance of privacy, they ain't seen nothing yet! (And if Marie's honeymoon with new husband Louis XVI are accurately depicted, with everyone except Howard Cosell monitoring the royal bed, then no wonder the poor guy couldn't perform.

I doubt that, under the circumstances, 1970s Warren Beatty could've either.) All of Ms. Coppola's seemingly oddball directorial choices (traditional classical music vying with 1980s New Wave pop hits on the soundtrack, casting of extremely American actors like Molly Shannon, Jason Schwartzman and especially Rip Torn) work beautifully to communicate her vision of Marie as a VERY typical teenage girl thrust into situations that she's completely ill-equipped to handle, and dealing with them no better or worse than most other teenage girls would.

(OK, maybe Joan of Arc would be an exception, but that's another story.) Casting Bring It On's feckless head cheerleader in the title role is therefore a no-brainer, but Kirsten Dunst, in a wonderful example of an actor completely trusting the director, comes through with a winningly natural, relaxed performance that makes Marie's tragedy even more devastating; in one of history's ultimate examples of The Peter Principle gone berserk, here's a sweet kid promoted far beyond her level of competence.

MGM's expensive 1938 epic take on this story starring Norma Shearer as Marie (and featuring a terrific, justifiably acclaimed supporting turn by Robert Morley as Louis) has just been released to DVD; it's extremely enjoyable but tries a little too hard to justify Marie's seeming callousness toward the poor--maybe that's why it was listed a few years ago in National Review magazine's list of the 100 greatest conservative movies of all time.

It's understandable that in Ms. Coppola's version of Marie's life we mostly don't SEE the poor (although check out the extremely dirty look a peasant doing her gardening shoots at her in a seeming throwaway scene!) because Marie not only apparently didn't see them either, but seemed not to have even been taught that they existed.

The French revisionists who condemned Ms. Coppola's film at early screenings completely missed her point: she's not at all justifying Marie's reign but is presenting it with deep insight and compassion as the tragedy of a tiny, delicate crystal figurine inadvertently caught in a hailstorm.