Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’: pretty but valley-girl deep
By Jane Holahan
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:40
For two hours, we get to explore Versailles, look at lavish dresses, amazing wigs, stunning food and scenic gardens.
Alas, for two hours, we also get to watch the young queen of France lollygag, looking bored, tired and unfulfilled.
The more unhappy she is, the more shoes she buys. Clearly, all this material stuff can’t make you happy.
And that’s about as deep as “Marie Antoinette” gets.
Director/writer Sofia Coppola obviously knows how to make a movie. Allowed to film at Versailles, she captures the chilly beauty of the palace and its elegant gardens.
There is a richness to the film, a sense of authenticity that draws you into it, even when she’s inserting ’80s pop tunes as well as the more appropriate Vivaldi into the soundtrack and dropping valley-girl angst into the dialogue.
What Coppola doesn’t quite know how to do is make Marie’s story compelling.
After about 45 minutes of wandering around Versailles with the young queen, who was only 14 when she arrived in France from Austria, everything gets kind of boring.
We never really get into the head of the queen, played by Kirsten Dunst.
Coppola has created an insular world at Versailles. We occasionally hear about bread riots or how support for the American Revolution is causing debt, but it’s only a sentence here, a raised eyebrow there. Coppola wants us to be as oblivious to the outside world as Marie is.
The portrayal of the vapid young girl is sympathetic. Here is someone who becomes a pawn in international politics.
We watch her, as a young princess, make her way around palace politics, winning favor with the popular crowd, dissing the king’s mistress (Asia Argento is terrific as the nasty Madame du Barry and I wanted the movie to be about her instead), and making fashion statements galore.
OK, fine. Now it’s time to move into high gear and get inside her head. Instead, Coppola keeps watching. And watching and watching.
And I began wondering: Does Coppola have anything to say? Anything beyond the obvious fact that a new pair of shoes won’t make you happy?
We all know Marie’s fate. We all know that those pesky little bread riots will lead to revolution, and revolution will lead to her arrest and a date with the guillotine at 37.
Is her Marie Antoinette a cautionary tale for today’s Paris Hiltons and Nicole Ritchies? Is it a commentary on our mindless materialism? A pointed reference to Princess Diana, who was a year younger when she died?
Coppola chooses not to show anything too ugly. The movie ends when Marie leaves Versailles under arrest.
Too bad, because Coppola’s skills as a filmmaker would have worked beautifully as things got desperate. And the movie would have gotten the charge it needed.
Watching “Marie Antoinette” is like looking at all of the ads in Vogue but never getting around to reading any of the articles.
Not that those articles are about rocket science, but at least they give you something to think about while you look at the pretty pictures.
——— Jane Holahan is a New Era staff writer. Her column appears every other Wednesday.
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