Incompetent and Xenophobic Travesty of a Movie

Rating: 2/10 (23 October 2006)

Coppola's signature style  minimalist character development, superficial musings on life without any plot or drama  is here revealed for what it truly is; the clumsy attempts of a scion of Hollywood royalty to disguise her obvious lack of any discernible talent. 'Virgin Suicides', the impossibly over-rated 'Lost in Translation', and now 'Marie Antoinette', provide audiences with a damning trilogy of the very worst of film industry nepotism. Can any of us truly believe for a moment longer than this fiasco of a movie would ever have been made were it not for father Francis' power, or that his presence as Executive Producer, alongside her brother Roman's as Second Unit Director, and cousin Schwartzman's non-performance as Louis XVI, doesn't mark it out as the nepotistic family affair that it truly is?
'Marie Antoinette' is a monumentally bad movie. There is no real plot, no narrative worthy of the term, no story beyond a few events casually strung together. There is no drama, no tension, no motivation given to any character. The entire movie consists of vacuous individuals wandering around beautiful and uninhabited locations doing absolutely nothing. Just as 'Lost in Translation' was little more than a tedious montage of Coppola's Tokyo vacation videos, so 'Marie Antoinette' amounts to little more than footage of friends playing dress up in old buildings. And to make matters worse, they play dress up in inaccurate clothing in buildings that would not be built for another 100 years!
Devoid of any historical or political content, we see none of the political machinations of Antoinette and the various aristocratic power players in court. We see nothing of Louis's agonized indecision over the steady forward march of democratic reform. We see nothing of the chaotic bustling city that was the Palace of Versailles, the troop maneuvers or constant petitioning that foreshadowed the march of the Parisian fishwives. We see, and feel, nothing of the woman Marie Antoinette or her plight. Just as Coppola invites us in 'Lost in Translation' to laugh at the Japanese and Japanese culture, at the funny accent and oh-so-amusing cultural idiosyncrasies, here she invites us (repeatedly) to laugh at the hilarious sight of men wearing make-up and wigs. Her complete disregard of history goes way beyond a filmmakers desire to update a compelling story and reveals a deep-seated contempt for history, tradition, and foreign cultures.
But such contempt can hardly come as a surprise when Coppola's movies are invariably auto-biographical. They tell the stories of bored little rich girls who desperately want to be taken seriously while ordering room service and buying new shoes. I sincerely hope that every critic that has heaped praise on this talentless fraud of a writer/director, and everyone who voted for her Oscar win, is suitably ashamed, for this Empress has finally been revealed to truly have no clothes.