understated historical drama

Rating: 8/10 (7 November 2006)

Perhaps unfairly, the name Marie Antoinette has become virtually synonymous with the upper class' indifference to the sufferings of the poor. Even all these centuries later, many people still believe that the much-maligned French queen actually uttered the words, "Let them eat cake," when confronted with the news that her subjects were starving (the phrase actually comes from a play popular at the time). Writer/director Sofia Coppola's new film, "Marie Antoinette," based on the book "Marie Antoinette: The Journey" by Antonia Fraser, seems determined to clear her name and change that perception.
In this film, Marie Antoinette is seen as a sheltered, somewhat frivolous young girl unprepared for the role history was about to thrust upon her. The movie begins at the moment when the Archduchess of Austria, aged 14, has been promised in wedlock to France's Prince Louis XVI as part of a treaty between the two countries. She is quickly whisked away to her new nation and new role, becoming a virtual prisoner to the proscribed rites and regulations of court life at Versailles in the late 18th Century.
In a wise move artistically (if not commercially), Coppola has seen fit to bleed the film of most of its potential hyperbole and melodrama, choosing instead to concentrate on the gossipy pettiness and mind-numbing rituals of royal life at that time. We see Marie completely stripped of any sense of personal privacy, as she endures the indignities of a virtual cast of thousands having a hand in her dressing herself in the morning and being constantly under the watchful eye of moral advisers on the lookout for any breach of etiquette or protocol deemed unbecoming of a queen. Coppola immerses us in all the finery and opulence of the glittery setting, while the drama ever so subtly plays itself out. Even though Marie clearly resents the restricted life she is forced to endure, she rarely whines or wallows in self-pity, choosing instead to accept her role with an uncomplaining, almost fatalistic, good grace. Even when her husband refuses for years to consummate their marriage, she remains generally sympathetic to him and understanding of his "problem." There are those who will find this movie slow-moving, stultifying, and boring because it doesn't go over-the-top by focusing on major moments of crisis or by overplaying the queen's famed cruelty or self-indulgence. She is, instead, seen as a woman neither actively engaged in the outside world nor entirely dismissive of it. Some have objected to the fact that the filmmakers have stacked the deck in her favor by showing us so little of what life was like for the suffering populace of the nation. But it is just that insularity that helps us to see how a woman with such an apparently good heart could have been so badly misunderstood by those in her own time and by generations that followed. At the end, when she and her family are being carted off to certain doom by a mob thirsting for rectification and vengeance, she seems genuinely bewildered, yet also strangely heroic in her stoicism and grace. Much of this is due to the tour de force performance by Kirsten Dunst, who never overstates the obvious but allows us to see the complex woman trapped beneath all the jewel-encrusted trappings of pampered French royalty. Marie may not display an interest in world affairs or the arcane machinations involved in running a nation, but she is shrewd enough to know how to maneuver her way through the often absurdly arbitrary power politics of court life.
The movie has garnered perhaps its greatest notoriety for employing an anachronistic rock music soundtrack (a la "A Knight's Tale"). For me, this worked fairly well (though I don't think it is indispensable to the film by any stretch), mainly because it brings a more contemporary sensibility to a film that might otherwise feel weighted down by period piece stuffiness. History-obsessed purists may object to the choice, but even they may find compensation in the relatively understated and historically accurate approach the screenplay has taken towards her life as a whole.
"Marie Antoinette" is, more than anything else, a study of repression, of what happens when human beings are locked into figurative gilded cages and then are expected to go about their daily lives as if anything really mattered. Seen in that light, this is a very sad, very poignant - though often quite funny - movie indeed.