Pointless

Rating: 2/10 (20 October 2006)

So, I tried to go into this film with an open mind. I was already biased against it because I really didn't like Lost in Translation, and the trailer for MA was terrifyingly bad. However, it was getting good reviews and I saw a clip on Jon Stewart that made me think it might not be that bad. Well, the clip was good, but that was about it. So, let us go through piece by piece and say why this film just did not work.
Acting: Terrible. Awful. With the exception of Steve Coogan and Rose Byrne all the acting was dreadful. I quite like Kirsten Dunst, but she just couldn't make me care at all for her character. Jason Schwartzman - who I have also liked in other films was a complete mess. I am still trying to figure out how he was trying to play the king. Was he a confused teenager or did he have some kind of mental disorder? Yeesh.
Also, the accents were very jarring. Sometimes it can work when all the characters have accents that they are not supposed to have. Coppola said that Amadeus was an inspiration for her. That film worked despite all the historical inaccuracies because it had a good script . . . which leads us to . . .
Script: Ummm, was there one? If there was, it was about 5 pages long. And it was there to serve as a bit of narrative to let the audience know that things were bad in MA's marriage. There must have been about 5 letters from her mother telling her that she had to have an heir. This was pointless after the first letter and was maybe supposed to raise tension . . . except it just got really repetitive and annoying. The person with the most lines was probably Steve Coogan, and his lines were mostly exposition. "Oh, Your Majesty, you might not want to buy another pair of shoes because the people have no food and are starting to turn against you." Very poorly written, wooden dialogue, except for some scenes that seemed as though the actors were just ad-libbing, which would make sense considering the script was so bad.
Plotting in general: This film basically serves as a 2 hour advertisement for the Shopping Network, and a travelogue for France. The opulence is well filmed, you leave with images of the dresses etc. in your mind, and to give Coppola credit, she does beautiful scenery shots, but in the end, all you have witnessed is 2 hours of vapid shallow self-indulgence that really does no justice to the social setting. Without showing the audience the conditions that the poor lived in, we don't care that MA lives in luxury. It just looks neat. I guess that's what it boils down to: You just don't care. The funny thing is, the person I saw this with knew nothing about that time in history, and she was all excited because Coppola kept insisting that it was not going to be a history lesson, but rather really accessible for "young people" - don't even get me started on how insulting that is to said "young people" - but I had to explain practically everything to her after the film because the politics and social aspect are given so little time that if you didn't have any idea of the history you would be completely lost and - again - not care. I don't care about anachronisms and I'm not a purist - like I said, I liked Amadeus a lot - but with a film in a historical setting more than 10 minutes explanation is required for some people. The only thing that did bother me was the implication that the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, when it was the other way around. That's just historically important.
So, I guess that's it. 2 hours of characters you don't care about doing things that are in no way put into any context to make them appear wrong . . . so you don't care. What a waste of a great historical story, usually good actors, and honestly, cinema in general.