Marie antoinette review

Rather than a critical portrait of the infamous French queen, MARIE
ANTOINETTE sees her as a bird in a gilded cage. Essentially traded like property to the French royal family for political capital, Marie lives the high life but one dominated by ennui and loneliness. Coppola’s Versailles insulates Marie from the outside world, all the better to understand why she fritters away her time on fashion and sweets while opposition to the crown builds in the streets of Paris.
MARIE ANTOINETTE is a gorgeous film with sumptuous production and costume design. Cinematographer Lance Acord’s natural lighting creates a fantasy world inside the royal home and highlights the beauty of the countryside with sun- kissed shots. Every frame of MARIE ANTOINETTE is like a painting, be it the stunning images of reflected light on the palace or the teeming party scenes.
Coppola’s talent with imagery and atmosphere make her narrative weaknesses all the more glaring. The fashion-conscious MARIE ANTOINETTE looks great. Imagine what this attractive but empty shell of a movie might have been with something inside it. Coppola has borrowed a thing or two from Wong Kar-wai when it comes to depicting wistful alienation, but unlike her previous efforts, here she struggles to give audiences any reason to care. There’s little psychological depth to the characters, and often they’re undercut by stilted dialogue, perhaps none more than Schwartzman.

Schwartzman came to attention as Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE.
Whether fair or not, it’s hard to separate the actor from his breakthrough role, especially when playing another awkward, sullen character with an odd hobby.
Magnifying the problem, Coppola’s screenplay leads many of the performers to act as though this period piece is a contemporary production staged by the Max
Fischer Players. Some of MARIE ANTOINETTE is intended to play as comedy, but it's not always clear when that's the case and when it's accidentally