Review: "Marie Antoinette"

According to Antonia Frasier's article in this month's Vanity Fair, Sophia Coppola wanted to turn her 2002 biography of the French queen into a movie because she could identify strongly with the tale of bright young things living a life of privilege and decadence. She saw her own adolescence in Marie Antoinette's life as dauphine and, later, Queen. I guess this explains the soundtrack, which features your usual period music alongside tunes by The Cure, Bow Wow Wow ("I Want Candy" plays over one memorable shopping scene), Aphex Twin, and Adam Ant... just the kind of music that was big when Ms. Coppola was a teen. And amazingly, it works. The music and the gaudy eye candy and the freshly innocent Kirsten Dunst all make you painfully aware that Marie Antoinette was too young and dumb and full of fun to rule. And Jason Schwartzmann's awkwardness is a good match for the fat, ineffectual, sexually naive king obsessed by only two things: food and keys. This movie humanizes these much-maligned figures much more than The Queen was able to humanize Queen Elizabeth II, by removing them from their usual tragic context and showing us instead the young, free, vulnerable people who were just living their lives the way they were told to live them. It's now triply hard for me to believe that the Queen molested her son or practiced witchcraft. If decadence was her only sin, then she and her husband took the fall for their entire class.
Oh, and if this film doesn't take the Oscar for Best Costume Design, we are certainly in the endtimes.