Lush Budget, yes; History, no way

Rating: 3/10 (15 May 2015)

Few women have been so poorly served by historians or film makers as Marie Antoinette. Marie's life has become a clothes peg on which successive biographers & directors hang what they please. The 1942 Norma Shearer film misrepresents Marie as a high-minded queen, nobly dedicated to the subjects who showed their appreciation by killing her. (Based on a biography by Stefan Zweig, the film could not address Zweig's explicitly sexual theory for Louis XVI's failure to consummate his marriage for 7 years.) The 1956 French film "Marie Antoinette," with Michele Morgan, lacks analysis or explanation for what happens. "L'Autrichenne," with Ute Lemper, re-enacts the queen's trial; the dialog, from the trial records, is of scant interest. The best film to date is "Farewell, My Queen," a dramatization of events at Versailles in the days after the fall of the Bastille in July 1789. The ease with which Marie's attention wandered is made obvious, & the undereducated queen's failure to grasp what was happening around her offers the real explanation for the blundering that led her to the scaffold in 1793.
Sofia Coppola's films have been noted for a lack of character development & a preferential focus on atmosphere. "Marie Antoinette" bears out that observation in spades. Whatever chances to deal with the evolution of Marie's character after the Revolution's outbreak vanished with Coppola's decision to end the film with the royal family's departure from Versailles in October 1789. It is the one general truth shared by all historians that Marie achieved nobility of character only in the last months of her life, after Louis XVI's death in January 1793 and before her death 10 months later. Coppola evades precisely that period of Marie's life, and shows us only the whipped-cream years at Versailles. It isn't at all clear what we're supposed to take from this treatment.
Marie, played with a limp if sweet rag-doll complacency by a nearly expressionless Kirsten Dunst, is sent aged 14 to marry the doltish heir to the French throne. This would never have happened had not Marie's older sister, destined for the King of Naples, died of smallpox. Their mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had to advance her 2 youngest daughters, the elder of whom went to Naples. Marie, the youngest, was moved to the square of the Habsburg chessboard originally meant for the new Queen of Naples, and went to Versailles. It was never foreseen that she would marry the future King of France, so she had been left uneducated for her lot in life.
From a court that placed less value on formality than did Versailles, Marie disliked Versailles from the get-go. Formality is represented by the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis, in an effective if overdone performance), who presides over the daily ordeal whereby Marie has to dress, from the skin out, before courtiers. Dunst manages to convey the real Marie's irritation at this duty but, eager as ever to obey as her mother told her to do, goes with the program. She eats in public with her husband, and properly attends the delivery of her sister-in-law, though it causes her anguish since she herself has not yet had a child.
Coppola's hold on facts is slim. The sister-in-law who has that baby was the Comtesse d'Artois, but the film makes her the Comtesse de Provence, who was childless. We see 2 of Louis XVI's spinster aunts, Victoire and Sophie, but there were 3--the eldest, Adelaide, was the dominant one, & the real troublemaker who set Marie against Louis XV's mistress, du Barry. Marie had 4 live born children,of whom 2 died before the Revolution; we get 3 here, and only 1 dies.
The acting is largely bland if not lackluster, seemingly in keeping with Dunst's blankly smiling efforts to be charming. Marie is largely controlled, or directed, by more assertive types, particularly Madame de Polignac. Much of what we see Marie do in this film shows her trying to meet others' expectations, not her own wishes; were it not for her brother Emperor Joseph's visit to Versailles in 1777, during which he lectured Marie and Louis XVI on the lack of activity in the royal bed, she probably never would have had a child.
Coppola is evidently trying for humor by staging Joseph's lecture to Louis at Versailles' zoo, where a bull elephant gives a good imitation of the male human anatomy as Joseph explains how things are supposed to work. The image is too obvious and heavy-handed to work. The same is true of sequences showing ladies of Versailles learning to snort snuff (standing in for a substance snorted today), or passing around a tobacco pipe (standing in for something smoked today that is often passed around). This silliness reaches a climax with the notorious shot of Converse high-tops glimpsed during a sequence in which Marie and her friends sort through a selection of new clothing, asking "Can we get this in pink?"
Coppola was evidently trying to make Marie accessible, or relevant, by implying that she was like a modern teenager, obsessed with new clothes and hairstyles and experimenting with "snuff" and "pipe tobacco." Hogwash. There can be no valid comparison between an 18th-century princess and a teenager today. To begin with, today's teenage girls are, we hope, more concerned with ways to avoid pregnancy. In Marie's milieu, young girls were traded among kingdoms to serve as wombs, and throughout this film we see Marie constantly badgered to produce a male heir for her husband. At least Coppola didn't try to work smart phones or MP3s into this film.
The one redeeming point is that Copolla was allowed to film extensively in the palace of Versailles, at the Petit Trianon and its adjacent village, so we have some sense of how Marie lived there. But that was only a part of this tragic woman's life, which is ill served by Coppola's essentially meaningless presentation.