Marie Antoinette is a pretty movie with scenes in the Palace of Versailles, in forests and ornate theatres, with many people dressed in incredible clothes and eating magnificent platters of wonderfully arranged food. In fact it won awards only given for the visual aspects of movie making. There is the basis for a great movie, but… It is really shallow.
Producer-director Sophia Coppola comes from an amazing family, father, Francis Ford Coppola, cousin, Nicholas Cage, and several more. She has been an actress and I was tempted to say she should have stayed with that but she produced and directed ‘Lost in Translation’ which I liked a lot and ought to review.It has been trendy since the middle of last century to take Shakespeare’s works and modernize them. This is of the same ilk. Coppola read about Marie Antoinette and attempted to rehabilitate her by modernizing her history, and failed. She took pretty Kirsten Dunst who plays American teenagers really well, and made her do the Queen of France with the character of an American teenager. She also took one of her cousins, Jason Schwartzman and made him play Louis the Sixteenth in much the same way he played Jeremy in Shop Girl. Jeremy was perfect but no one would have allowed the King of France to be like that.
Then there were things which were just downright silly – late 20th Century sports shoes in Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe, French aristocrats dancing to a rock tune. Oh dear! I sound like a real movie critic. It’s the worst movie I have seen in years, other than some horror stuff I bought and watched by mistake because their titles made me think they were legends I had read and enjoyed (‘Beowulf ‘and ‘The Brothers Grimm’ – really, really bad). This one was boring, don’t bother watching it unless you want to see the beautiful costumes. Music bad, acting terrible, conceptualization worse.