'Marie Antoinette' review

Sofia Coppola's grand vision of excess and aristocracy falls flat

By Ceda Xiong
Published: October 30th, 2006 | 10:26am

Sofia Coppola has a mysterious allure that is probably more attractive to women than to men, and she makes very good movies for alienated young women. They are isolated from the greater world, due their individual actions or unassailable circumstances. The world from which we see a Coppola movie is all interior and exclusively private. And maybe it is because Coppola works in this echo chamber that Marie Antoinette falls so short of the spirit Coppola was aiming to portray.

While Coppola has tried her darndest to give her character life, to flesh out what had been a shallow political sketch, her characterization of Marie Antoinette is forever stuck on peripherals of teen angst. This sort of dramatic inner angst works well in the beginning of the movie - Marie Antoinette as a fresh 14-year-old bride given over to strange lands and stripped of her belongings. This is a side of teenage angst which all of us can understand, but the movie never budges from the premise that Marie Antoinette is a lonely teenager with no one around to accept her.

Kirsten Dunst is very pretty in this movie, and this prettiness is what Coppola points to, again and again, with shoes, dresses, and lovers as a sort of justification for interest in the character. At one point, a courtier comments that "She's so pretty, just like a cake." She seemed, propelled along by her friends, by her family, by everything except herself, to be idling through life. While this may be true (history does acknowledge that Marie Antoinette had very little interest in politics and even less self-awareness of her own actions), Coppola should realize that it does not make for a very interesting movie to follow an inert personality.

The film abruptly ends at the beginning of the queen's escape from Versailles, a strange choice considering that the following months, no matter how tragic, were the moments that Marie Antoinette shone in her character. While the movie is gorgeous - a beautiful vision of French aristocratic life - its emptiness bored and drained its forced joie de vivre.