“Marie Antoinette” is the name of a film made in 1938 by the great W.S. Van Dyke (Director), the wonderful Norma Shearer (Marie Antoinette), the brilliant Robert Morley (Louis XVI), the talented Tyrone Power, the inimitable John Barrymore, the imposing Joseph Schildkraut, and others whose names will be forever enshrined in film history for this and other grand achievements.

“Marie Antoinette” is also the name of a film made in 2006 by the uncoordinated Sofia Coppola (Director), the ditzy Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette), the ineffectual Jason Schwarzman (Louis XVI), the unfortunate Rip Torn (who must nave been duped, bribed, or blackmailed), and others who will spend much of their later careers trying to live down the fiasco.

This review is of course about the latter.  I can understand why some reviewers actually like the thing.  It’s a pretty puff piece, a big fluffball of empty calories – cinematic junk food.  In this case, it’s not super-salty potato chips, but packing peanuts soaked the dregs of a deep-fat fryer.  It’s hard to resist this sort of toothsome slop – else most of the fast-food traps would be out of business. 

The story of Marie Antoinette is a sad one, and in the end she suffered the fate that most members of her class richly deserved.  This story needs to be told with empathy and dignity.  In this film there is some feeble attempt at the former, but absolutely none of the latter. 

The banality of the script is almost iconic, leaping like a starved carnivore from cliché to cliché.  Amazingly, the script touches effectively on the point that “Let them eat cake” (literally, “brioche”) may not have said by Marie Antoinette at all.  In fact the script does a fair job of avoiding historical howlers.

We can at least say that the script gets the acting it deserves – as Dorothy Parker once said of Katharine Hepburn, no less – running “the gamut of emotions from A to B”.  The most important problem with the script is where it stops.

The connection of Marie Antoinette with the great French Revolution is fundamental.  In this film, the Revolution takes place with scarcely any intimation that it’s brewing.  But the Revolution begins on schedule anyway, but is barely under way when the film ends.  Marie Antoinette’s life in the first years of the Revolution, and her execution particularly, may as well not have happened so far as this film is concerned.  This is even more lame than (for instance) ending the story of Cinderella at the point when she arrives home after running away from the ball.  (Of course, I’ll bet you that most of any modern audience will sit there gaping, saying to themselves, “I wonder what happened to her after that”.  Such is the state of modern education.)

Indubitably, the lamest part of this “Marie Antoinette” is the musical (if you can call it that) score.  It’s not merely lame, it’s tawdry and terminally stupid.  When it’s not insipid musak, it’s rock.  Now, rock music is incapable of any real emotional content whatsoever.  It’s OK for car chases, fist fights, shoot-outs, tractor pulls, monster trucks, unbridled raunchiness, and other events of more than usual empty mindlessness.  It’s totally unsuitable for any film that aspires to some degree of quality.  The quantity of this stuff is a good indicator of the depths to which the film sinks.

There is a little decent music in the film, every note of it composed during the period of Marie Antoinette’s life or before.  Even there, the film’s penchant for cheap shots shines (if that’s the word) through.  Recall the several little episodes when Marie Antoinette is awakened and dressed in the morning.  The music is Vivaldi’s Concerto for Diverse Instruments.  Where have we heard that before?  Remember “All That Jazz”?  This is the music that plays during Roy Scheider’s wake-up ritual.  “Marie Antoinette” uses some good music to good purpose and even then it’s just a cheap rip-off of another film.

I suppose it can be said that “Marie Antoinette” has its good points.  The sets and costumes are very bright, cheery, and not inaccurate.  On the other hand, the genuine tawdriness of late 18th-Century French fashion serves admirably to set off the equally genuine tawdriness of the film.  The same may be said for the complete absence of Voltaire as a character.  After all, why bring out philosophy when you can trot out titillating assertions that Marie Antoinette was a slut.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age