Below is a list of 10 things I noticed concerning "Marie Antoinette":
1. You need never to have even heard of the 18th century French queen to enjoy this movie.
2. Kirsten Dunst, so rigid and emotional in "Spiderman", pulls a divine performance out of her hat. Writer-director Sofia Coppola astounds us again by making this one-note actress play a symphony.
3. Marie Antoinette was practically traded to the French court by her mother to produce an heir with the lackless Prince Louis (Jason Schwartzman), and to cement relations with Austria. When she first arrives on the French border she is stripped and searched to ascertain whether she is definitely a woman and then is forced to enter France with nothing. Literally: she is naked.
4. Marie is locked into a world that she can hardly understand and that never even tries to understand her. She is feed and cared for like a queen in a beehive.
5. The palace they live in at Versailles, where Sofia Coppola was granted unlimited access to film, is both opulent and insulating. It is an island of royalty all to itself, freed from the constraints of society, poverty, desires beyond ability. These people are royalty for goodness sakes and they can't be bothered with the simple act of feeding one's people. They have to dress the queen!
6. Molly Shannon, as a snippy countess, and Danny Huston as Marie's older brother are priceless comedic cameos that bulster the movie at exactly the right points.
7. The production is eye-meltingly gorgeous. Rarely is a setting used as a character and even more rarely is it done right but here it transforms the movie from a hilarious comedy of manners to an elegent, layered, costume drama.
8. Lonliness is again on Sofia Coppola's mind and again she writes it into characters with such skill that even as Marie parties away her country's riches we are sympathetic. She was bought to be a princess and now she is a queen locked into a facade and the only thing remaining her is to gamble, both figuratively and literally, with the greatest asset given a monarch: her country's fortune.
9. The curious hazard of Marie's eventual beheading is sidestepped with grace in the final scenes. As she puts it so well when asked what she is doing by gazing over the courts of her palace she replies "I'm saying goodbye". The perfect ending shot is all the epilogue one needs.
10. The soundtrack and up-to-date dialogue have been criticized but they shouldn't be. Marie wasn't in the past in this movie. She was a teenager in the Now. A teenager with power and wealth beyond her imagining who was more than willing to test her limits and the limits of her people.
She was left to party and she lost her head.
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