Let them watch frosting: Sophia Coppola's flashy tea party.

Rating: 3/10 (3 June 2008)

This embalmed piece of empty storytelling makes for one beautiful corpse with its Versailles locale, opulent set design and costuming and in the incapable hands of Sofia Coppola rigor mortis sets in fast.
This latest re-telling of the fall of French Monarchy and the woman who helped bring it down is filled with sumptuous scenes of glorious costumes, colorfully lush decor and gluttonous excess by France's 18th century beautiful people. Coppola remains at a loss however to bring any substance to character or story. What she does she advances clumsily and with nothing much to say the striking imagery simply evaporates into fashion show and a caravan of pastry carts.
Kirsten Dunst as teeny bopper Marie conveys beauty and little else. Dunst is not much of an actress and she is just as clueless here as she was in Coppola's other travesty, The Virgin Suicides. Jason Schwartzman is nearly invisible as Louis XVI. He is a cloying amalgam of a 10 year old and Hoffman's Ben Braddock. As a lady in waiting Judy Davis takes her repressed acting style to a new level. Rip Torn as Louis V gives the only acting performance the film offers, while the rest of the cast is required to do little else but display expressions of disdain and condescension and eat with their mouths open.
In addition to her directionless direction Coppola employs a music score featuring Bow Wow Wow (ranting I Want Candy) and other au courants to personalize her vision with some ironic hipness. It comes across forced and uneven.
Marie Antoinette is like a display wedding cake in a bakery shop window. It has an impressive frosted surface of color and design but underneath it remains hollow.