Marie Antionette (new review!)

2.5/4 stars

I wouldn't have thought it possible for Sophia Coppola to create a boring movie. Her previous effort, Lost in Translation, is gorgeous, bittersweet, introspective and funny. With Marie Antionette, once again, I appreciated what was offered visually, I liked the characterization (as executed both by Coppola as writer and her cast) and enjoyed the soundtrack. Still, I found the movie dragged on, it was ultimately unsatisfying, and yes, boring. I think of it as an important virtue to be able to have patience for movies that reward it, but Marie Antionette simply doesn't have enough going on to justify its slow pace and length. It isn't that the construction is poor, it's that the purpose is lacking. Take for instance a scene that occurs about a half hour into the movie, in which the title character stands naked in a room full of important visitors, waiting for them to ceremonially dress her. The scene is a funny and effective illustration of the way in which status and expectations have deprived her of a sense of self. But at half an hour into the movie, we know all this already. What would have been an effective scene in the first fifteen minutes becomes a sign of a film struggling to take off. The film meanders, and can't seem to settle on a message. Its trappings exude that it wants to be a movie about a bad girl, but it can't bring itself to portray Antionette as anything less than a saint. She cheats on her husband, but she's forgiven for that at first by his inattention to her, and second by her self-sacrificing decision to stand by him. She parties too much, but the film seems to say that doing so is her only way of winning back any degree of teenage self expression, and besides, she is shown to have great compassion for her people and those around her anyway. The movie is aggressively modern in its execution, but gets weighed down in courtly period drama. There is an obsession with historical flavor, but a lack of historical context. This brings me to my final objection (I would say that what comes next is a spoiler, except that this being a historical movie, you probably already know it, and anyway the movie doesn't show it), the fact the movie makes no mention of Antionette's execution. I've read all sorts of reasons why this is a brilliant decision, but it seemed to me to be the film unable to stomach its own subject matter. Perhaps actually addressing the main character's downfall would bring some resolution to whatever arc the film is trying to build, after all you can't have a tragedy if you ignore the tragic ending. As it is, this is an overly long movie that ironically omits its final act.