Coppola runs out of ideas pretty quickly with this thing

Rating: 4/10 (9 December 2010)

Do you remember that remake of Romeo and Juliet that starred Leonardo DeCaprio and Claire Danes? You know, the one where they fused The Bard with the look and sound of MTV (the one that used to play music videos and not inane reality shows about sub-literate white trash)? That's sort of what this film is like except instead of springing from the mind of Shakespeare, this version of history comes dribbling out of Sofia Coppola.
Based fairly loosely (even by Hollywood standards) on the life of the ill fated and historically maligned Queen of France, Marie Antoinette starts out pretty good. Beginning with young Marie (Kirsten Dunst) being swept away from her Austrian home to wed the grandson of the French king, Coppola and Dunst combine to paint and engaging and sympathetic picture of girl stranded in an exotic and intimidating land with the weight of two kingdoms placed on her slender shoulders. Using remarkably little dialog, they let you feel what Marie might have felt as she was bound in matrimony to the sweetly sad and seemingly asexual lad who would become Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) and placed at the heart of the complex and bizarre protocol of the French royal court of the late 18th century.
There's little attempt to portray either Marie or Louis with any historically accurate mannerisms and Dunst and Schwartzman bring a very modern sensibility to the roles. In their case, it helps you to appreciate these historical figures as real human beings. When Rip Torn and Asia Argento try to do the same thing as the French king and his mistress, the results are unfortunate. Modern pop songs are also splashed throughout the movie, sometimes to good effect and sometimes like a balpeen hammer to the forehead.
However, after being very successful at introducing you to Marie and the strange new world she's thrown into, the movie starts to drag and then splinters apart. It's like Coppola had a very good understanding of what she wanted young Marie to be like and a firm grasp of how to tell the story of her early days at the royal court. But as Marie grew into her position as the future queen and became an established part of royal society, it's like Coppola didn't have the slightest clue what that Marie was like and had no idea what to do with that part of her life. The second half of the film is an exercise in Coppola throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. In one scene, Marie is a spendthrift fashionista. In another, she's a naturalist with a bent for philosophy. In one moment, she's happily in love with her odd little Louis and in another, she's having an affair for nothing but selfish lust. Supporting characters are set up as being important to the story and then simply forgotten. And none of it is connected in any way to make any point. Without giving you anything to hold your interest, you're left just wanting the movie to hurry up and get to the ending that you know is coming.
Aside from a minor implication that supporting the American Revolution helped bankrupt the French monarchy and spur the French Revolution, this movie never addresses any of the great and terrible problems that wracked France during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie. The people of France are shown only at the very end of the film and then as nothing but an undifferentiated mob. I don't think there's ever been a book, play or movie made about the time of the French Revolution that would teach you less about the subject than this thing.
After a promising start, Marie Antoinette sputters and stumbles to an unsatisfying end. Dunst is unconditionally adorable but even her profound charms can't salvage this half-cooked casserole of a film.