Finally, it was my turn for a movie in my family’s Netflix queue, and good luck that my movie arrived over the holiday weekend. I’d been wanting to see Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette for some time. Turns out I could’ve kept waiting.

For historical film buffs like me, it was something of a mixed bag. I will say this: the look of it is fabulous. It’s as frothy and baroque as a Fragonard painting. Kirsten Dunst is appealing as Marie, and Jason Schwartzman as the hapless Louis XVI looked the part. Coppola managed to capture the odd flavor of France’s decaying ancien regime: hedonism coupled to ennui, which brought about an attitude of unforgivable blindness to the country’s political powderkeg.

Despite the movie’s strong visual appeal, it lacked a story. So the whole thing was about as satisfying as one of those Laduree pastries Coppola managed to cram into every shot: it looked great, but lacked substance. Marie Antoinette arrives in Versailles an artless teen who loves puppies; as France’s Dauphine she becomes a young woman who loves puppies and lots of clothes; then there’s a muddled third act where the loss of one of her children and a lover make her grow up, except we really don’t see any of that. Coppola’s fond of long reaction shots, and even a great actor like Dunst can’t tell a whole story with facial reactions. So by the time the Revolution arrives on their doorstep at Versailles, you don’t really feel any sense of pity or empathy for Marie. She–and her husband–remained stunted adolescents throughout the whole movie.

Maybe that was what Coppola was going for. But to engage a viewer, an actual story is needed. Instead we got lots of shots of the young queen sitting in a field of daisies longing for a more natural life. So for me, the movie ultimately failed.

I will say that one of Coppola’s most audacious decisions, a soundtrack consisting of 1980′s New Wave music, was inspired. The film’s strongest scene was the shopping montage where Marie and her ladies are selecting new shoes and gorging on pastries to the jungle soundscape of Bow Wow Bow’s I Want Candy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In a coda to our Mary Sue discussion, my daughter and I watched The Sound of Music together over the weekend. I’d forgotten that Maria is the embodiment of a Mary Sue. With her guitar and her plucky spirit, she grated on every last nerve I possessed. But my daughter loved the movie, and she loved Maria. So it was a reminder that Mary Sues are very much a matter of taste and age and experience. I did sorta want the Nazi’s to break her guitar, though.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
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