good lord

Rating: Null/10 (7 November 2006)

A film about out of touch European monarchy, although perhaps the most clueless person here is the director, Sophia Coppola. The movie looks gorgeous all the way through, and the first half hour is actually very good, promising to be a sort of impressionistic Dangerous Liaisons riff, and the biggest surprise is how effectively the soundtrack of modern underground rock contributes to the atmospherics. But once France's future queen settles into Versailles, the film goes completely off the rails. What little drama that can be found centers entirely around whether Marie will ever have kids, other than that it's interminable costume changes and masquerade balls and adoring close ups of French pastries. Coppola's celebration of-not to mention obvious identification with--the teenage princess' world of privilege and excess is a bit mind-boggling, and rather squarely lines up the film's sympathies opposite the French Revolution. Kirsten Dunst's inadequate performance brings this folly into sharp relief-while the rest of the cast manage to affect accents derived from some European nationality or another, every time Dunst opens her mouth a bland, dimwitted suburban American drawl issues forth, so distracting as to take the viewer right out of the picture. Starving, rioting Frenchmen-barely mentioned until the film's last ten minutes, although students of history will know they were lurking about outside the palace gates-eventually arrive, big meanies who ruin Marie's tea party and drag her off to prison, leaving Marie sad about having to leave her pretty little palace. The events surrounding Marie's subsequent incarceration and execution are left to the viewer's imagination, an excellent opportunity for an interesting dramatic turn lostthe movie avoids such gravity at all costs. Even if Coppola was trying to make the case for Marie being an innocent caught up in the tide of history, those endless Hallmark card shots of angelic golden locked children playing with fuzzy baby goats and yummy French soldiers who show up for no reason other than a dreamy romance novel moment never add up to anything more than royalty porn for chicks, and in the end it all manages to be embarrassingly vapid, as well as historically myopic.