Painted Like A Portrait and Just As Two-Dimensional

Rating: 5/10 (21 October 2006)

There is a scene towards the end of Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette where Marie gives a standing ovation as the curtain falls at an opera only to look around to find unapplauding hands placed politely in laps and cold glares thrown in her direction. I imagine that Marie attending a screening of Coppola's bio-pic would produce similar results. Marie Antoinette does not play as a film of plot and intrigue, but as a series of portraits: Marie in society, Marie with husband, Marie accessorized, Marie gambling with friends, Marie with children, etc. While a portrait may hold special significance to whom it depicts, it will always struggle to hold the interest of the viewer without some kind of story.
Coppola gives us a whiff of a story like a French perfume that fades in its poignancy after the first squirt. The main conflict of the film resides in the necessity of Marie Antoinette to produce an heir by the next in line to the throne, Louis XVI, who is less than sexually invigorated. While this storyline might have worked in the form of a raunchy comedy, for a two hour bio-pic drama, it does not produce the desired climax. Part of the problem, I think, comes from the fact that every character lacks arc and depth. Marie Antoinette's stunted state of superficiality is forgivable for accuracy's sake, but not a single supporting character proves him or herself noteworthy or compelling.
Like any portrait by Velasquez, Rembrandt, or Da Vinci, Coppola succeeds in creating a picturesque, artistically drawn representation of Marie Antoinette's life. The setting, costumes, and cinematography are beautifully combined to bring a realism to the film that is unfortunately and inexcusably broken by the dissonant chord struck by the inclusion of modern music. Storming through the film's authenticity like the commoners through the Bastille is the distracting conglomeration of French, British, and American accents. I am usually forgiving of inaccurate dialects as long as they are consistent, but in a film centered around French royalty (with a few Austrians thrown in), the discrepancy of accents adds an inappropriate diversity to the company of otherwise homogenous characters.
Compounding the problem of dialect are cringe-worthy line deliveries by Jason Schwartzman who seems unable to discern the difference between awkward sexual interaction and awkward acting. Though the intention of his characterization of Louis XVI is to be more or less socially incompetent, his diction betrays nothing more than a verbatim memorization of the script which only creates awkwardness in the audience whose solitary hope for his character is that he will put his prepositions in the right places. As I listened to him speak throughout the film, I found myself transported back against my will to my high school English class where fellow students struggled to read Hamlet aloud, pausing after every syllable of "to be or not to be" in uncertainty over where to put the stress. Schwartzman's monotonous recitation of lines immensely less eloquent than Shakespeare's does not excuse, but rather draws excessive attention to his poor performance in this film. Kirsten Dunst is overall convincing as Marie Antoinette, but I do not see her as deserving much recognition come awards season.
As I review this long list of grievances with the film, I cannot help but admit that I would have forgiven every last one of them had Coppola only given us the satisfaction of the guillotine scene. I even have a suggestion for the pop song to score it: Alice Cooper's "Chop, Chop, Chop."