Coppola tries too hard to be poignant.

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2006)

Last night I went with my mother, my younger sister, and my sister's friend to see Sofia Coppola's latest production, "Marie Antoinette." I had seen trailers and thought it would be interesting, especially since I had heard the soundtrack and knew it consisted of mostly modern rock. Two and a half hours later, as the screen finally darkened and the credits started to roll, Mom and I looked at each other with identical expressions of incredulity. We were both thinking the same thing: That's IT?!
As we drove home, huffing and puffing, several things crossed my mind:
1. Maybe Coppola's budget got cut when they were halfway through production, so they cut the screenplay short (as in, they stopped telling the story halfway through). The extravagant costumes surely must have usurped the budget normally reserved for screenwriters.
2. This is not the first Coppola film I have been disappointed with. "Antoinette" surpasses her 2003 release of "Lost in Translation" only in lag time. I was interested in seeing Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides," but after the disappointment of the other two, I could venture a guess that the reasons the virgins were driven to such an act was due to desperation at being trapped in yet another boring flick.
3. During the scene in which Kirsten Dunst is stripped of all Austrian belongings, including her clothing, my mother leaned over and whispered, "Kirsten Dunst has a weird backside." I myself didn't notice; I must have been preoccupied with searching for a plot.
4. Marie Antoinette did not, as the movie suggests, have an illicit love affair. This was a gaping example of Coppola's inserting falsehoods while skimming through the more interesting facts of Antoinette's life. Lady Antonia Fraser (the author of the biography on which Coppola based her production) would be horrified. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert offered an explanation for the lack of historical details: "That is because we are entirely within Marie's world. And it is contained within Versailles, which shuts out all external reality. It is a self-governing architectural island, like Kane's Xanadu, that shuts out politics, reality, poverty, society." But this does not explain Coppola's decision to include the affair, or her decision to gloss over the fact that Louis XVI had a slight (but reversible) medical problem which prevented him from performing in bed. The film was already rated PG-13, wouldn't this have been allowed?
5. At two and one-half hours in length, one would suppose the director had ample time to develop her characters. After all, the film covers at least ten years of her life. Instead we see montage after montage of shoes and champagne glasses and little cakes (what WERE those, anyway?). Most of the screen time is used depicting the couple's first few years of marriage. When, ten minutes before the end, we finally are offered something of substance, it is presented stoically. We learn (with no words uttered, of course) that she has lost her baby, but we only see a painting of Antoinette with her three children, then it is replaced by a painting with only two. Any chance of arousing the audience's sympathy with this tragedy is lost. Apparently Coppola thought the shoes were more important.
6. I am not impartial to the actors in this movie; I admire the previous work of Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, as well as many of the supporting cast members. I have seen them in other films and I know what they can do. The fact that I found the two stars completely dull in this film (by the time it was over I felt like bringing out the guillotine for them myself) is not their fault; it is the script. More interesting things happened to Marie than getting dressed in the morning, and we see this at least three times.
7. How much dialogue was in this movie? Most of it was dominated by Kirsten Dunst walking through the palace, Kirsten Dunst looking out a window, Kirsten Dunst looking longingly at oblivious Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI. Were they paying the actors by words uttered?
8. That Marie Antoinette's life was boring is a given. There was little to do, few people to talk to (fewer still who didn't gossip about you when your back was turned), and high expectations for propriety. But a modern audience doesn't need to see Kirsten Dunst walk past gossiping courtiers fifteen times to realize that they are talking about her. Coppola seems to have few points to drive home, but she drives them home with a sledgehammer. It is only a matter of time before the audience loses interest.
9. The budget for this film must have been huge. The locations are grand (the French government allowed the crew special permission to film in Versailles), the costumes are amazing. Why more of this budget could not have been spent on adequate screenplay, I don't know.
10. Maybe someone convinced Sofia Coppola to include modern music in order to keep the audiences awake.
Roger Ebert's rating: A My rating: C-