Ms. Coppola has directed a few good movies...

Rating: 4/10 (27 March 2010)

...but "Marie Antoinette" is not one of them. It (obviously) took me a while to get around to this one; I'd picked up a copy of the DVD a few years back, but somehow it'd gotten shuffled to the bottom of my watch list. Unfortunately, it should have stayed there, and I'll be dumping this one from my collection at first opportunity.
Crippled by Coppola's horrendously boring and trivial script, adapted from a novel of questionable merit, "Marie Antoinette" fails utterly to involve the viewer in the life of its titular lead. Oh, it presents that life, at least in its "hi-skool lite" historicity, but there's nary a drop of real substance to any of it. It's a costume drama with an emphasis on costume and little, if any, attention paid to drama.
Worse, it's haphazardly cast. Kirsten "Spider-Man" Dunst looks nothing like the real Marie Antoinette and it doesn't help matters that she's obviously too old for the time span in which most of the film is set. Coppola's cousin, Jason "I Heart Huckabees" Schwartzman, is notably awful as Louis XVI, an empty cipher at best; nepotism and a faint resemblance to Andy Garcia are the only reasons I can imagine that got him the role. Notables like Judy "Georgia" Davis, Danny "30 Days of Night" Huston, Rip "Men in Black" Torn, and Shirley "Trainspotting" Henderson are mostly wasted in supporting roles of varying importance, and various "names" like Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, and a stunningly unrecognizable Marianne Faithful make appearances as well. It's all for naught, since Coppola's screenplay gives them so little substance to embody. It's almost chilling to recall that she won a best original screenplay Oscar for "Lost in Translation." In the intervening years, she most certainly lost something herself: the ability to tell an engaging story.
Production values are "Marie Antoinette"'s saving grace. Filmed on location at the sumptuous Versailles grounds and elsewhere, and minutely costumed, set designed, art directed, and coiffed and made up to within an inch of its life, prettily photographed, the only major production element I loathed was the soundtrack, an amalgam of period music and utterly out of place "New Wave" pop from the likes of Bow Wow Wow, the Cure, and Adam and the Ants. Sonic incongruity at its most egregious.
Overall, a major disappointment, highlighted only by its attention to period detail, and Ms. Dunst's tail end. Completely ignorable.