a tranquilizing take on the most indulgent period in history

Rating: 2/10 (22 October 2006)

Hitchcock once said that film was real life with all of the dull parts cut out. I certainly never believed there was a dull minute in Marie Antoinette's life until this movie.
Lost in Translation might be one of the most overrated movies of all time, but assuming that it was as poignant as many critics and audiences felt it was, it worked in a modern Japan, and it had a story.
Marie Antoinette is a subject that doesn't work without opulence and indulgence: into the costumes and sets, and into a court where a queen made revelry to distract herself from the pains of an unfulfilled marriage. Coppola assumes that anyone interested in Marie Antoinette has no interest in the court she created, and assumes the audience might respond to the taciturn Lost in Translation formula in a period movie.
If adding contemporary music was not tasteless, it did not serve its intended purpose of adding life into the movie. Life might have come from the pain of Marie Antoinette's predetermined life, but instead of a breadth of insights, the viewer is made to suffer through a simple and non-faceted point that she was married to a sexually unresponsive man for over an hour. The rest of the film focuses on the escape of a garden and a child, rather than on the extravagance of Versailles court life. The movie that so long tries to make Marie Antoinette sympathetic does not even give a reason for this attempt. The film sidesteps her controversy with the people of France altogether and misses her beheading, and her imprisonment.
Kirsten Dunst, whose youthful voice surely earned her the role, is flat and without range even for a role that required little.
For those expecting fantastic costumes, those in Marie Antoinette are predictable. Few are memorable, and many more are simplistic. The fabric is incredible, but there is little detail save for some imaginative albeit limited trimmings.
In short, you can't make a movie about anything, no matter how seemingly grand and interesting, without a plot.