FILM “ROYALS”
THE QUEEN AND MARIE
ANTOINETTE
By Joel Johnson
By
happenstance, our favorite theater happened to be playing The Queen
and Marie Antoinette at the same time, and, perhaps even more
serendipitously, my wife and I opted to see them back-to-back. The two films
address remarkably similar themes even though the subjects of the two films
come from two different nations, England and France, and their lives are
separated by two centuries. Celebrity is a theme that both share.
Although
members of the House of Windsor (the English royal family) have long been
celebrities whose lives have been chronicled in the media, Princess Diana
almost single-handedly turned up the media glare. She was beautiful,
charming, and willing to use her celebrity to inspire philanthropy. Her
wedding to Prince Charles was an international media event. Nearly every
aspect of her life from that point to the tragic accident that took her life
was subject to scrutiny by the media and, in particular, the paparazzi who
stalk celebrities in the hope of catching a celebrity in an unguarded and
revealing photograph. It was to elude the paparazzi that Diana’s car
embarked on its ill-fated high-speed getaway. This event precipitates the
rest of the action in The Queen and that action is significant for
how it was chronicled by the media and evaluated through the prism of public
celebrity.
The
eighteenth-century French court concentrated the celebrities of that country
and of that time period at Versailles. These were men and women used to the
privilege and wealth that came with medieval feudal titles that they
inherited. They were focused on towering wigs, lavish clothes, matching
shoes, parties, petit fours, pastries, and more parties. With the punk rock
song that plays over the film’s day-glow pink opening credits, Sofia
Coppola’s Marie Antoinette starts drawing a parallel between
Versailles’ pampered eighteenth-century nobility and the overindulged
contemporary celebrities of stage, screen, and sports arena.
Duty is another aspect
of living life as a member of a royal family that both films share.
Decisions about whom to love and whom to marry that we, as regular folk,
consider personal are matters of state with political ramifications.
Marriages
in the eighteenth century established alliances between nations and empires.
These alliances and the royal houses themselves needed a line of succession
to be successful. The absence of heirs and, especially, the absence of King
Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to even have an inclination to attempt to
produce an heir created distress both at Versailles and back in Vienna where
Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) had been born an Austrian princess. This,
in turn, put great pressure on the young Marie Antoinette until an heir was
finally produced after many years of marriage.
Twentieth- and now twenty-first century royal marriages do not cement
international alliances, but they are governed by certain rules. Rules are a
very big part of The Queen. The rules on royal marriages specify that
a royal spouse must come from noble blood. The spouse of an heir to the
throne should not be a commoner. It is this need for nobility that made Lady
Diana Spencer a much more suitable bride for Charles, the Prince of Wales,
than his then-love and current spouse Camilla Bowles. This aspect of doing
one’s duty largely goes unacknowledged in The Queen, though it is the
root of the unhappiness that marred Charles and Diana’s marriage. The film
does focus on the differing perceptions of duty that the untimely death of
Diana placed on the royal family and, especially, Queen Elizabeth (Helen
Mirren). Her initial response to the death of her former daughter-in-law was
a disengaged and quiet stoicism. In her mind, the divorce between Charles
and Diana severed the family bond even though Diana was the mother of two
heirs to the throne. That explains the disengagement, but the stoicism is
rooted in Britain’s long tradition of reverence for a stiff upper lip. The
problem for the royal family was that the public around the world, but
especially in Britain, did not see Diana through the same eyes as the royal
family nor did they see the royal family’s duty in the same way. The public
grieved for the beautiful princess and didn’t understand why the royal
family wasn’t grieving as well.
This, of
course, brings us to Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) who had just
been elected a few months prior to Diana’s death. Blair was and is the
leader of the Labour Party. As one might expect from the name, this
political party tends to focus on the needs of the common people and not be
the party of entrenched wealth and privilege. That has usually been the
province of the Conservative Party. Consequently, one might assume a certain
antipathy from the leader of the Labour Party for the monarchy. However, the
film’s portrayal of Blair’s role in correctly reading the public’s mood and
acting as a catalyst for change in the royal family’s actions is a
significant part of the film and, very likely in real life, has provided him
with a reservoir of public support that has helped him govern for nearly ten
years.
Alas, the
French royal family had no political leader to help them respond to the
gathering clouds of change that would sweep them from power and lead to
their executions. Marie Antoinette spends very little time on the
business of governance. Ironically, the only time government policy is
addressed is when King Louis XVI’s ministers recommend support for the
American Revolution. This action is portrayed in the film as helping to
bankrupt the nation and contributing to widespread hardships that led to the
French Revolution. This may overemphasize the monetary cost of the American
intervention, since extravagance seemed to be a hallmark of everything at
Versailles, but it may perhaps be even more true that the ideas that served
as the justification for the American Revolution that Louis XVI happened to
nourish fueled the French Revolution that destroyed both his reign and his
family.
Director
Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan have done extraordinary work
with The Queen, giving the audience an intimate experience of a vivid
public event most of them probably experienced firsthand, since the
world’s media gave us live pictures of the public demonstrations of grief
and the state funeral for Diana. Segments of the film do make use of this
archival broadcast footage, and the filmmakers have gone the further step of
making some of the film’s footage have the same look as the archival footage
so they could be easily interspliced. There is solid ensemble acting
throughout the cast of The Queen. Some of the standouts include Helen
McCrory as Blair’s antimonarchist wife; Mark Bazeley as Blair’s supercilious
Chief of Staff Alastair Campbell; Roger Allam as the Queen’s loyal aide
Robin Janvrin; and James Cromwell as the pompous Prince Philip. However, the
film really belongs to Michael Sheen and, especially, Helen Mirren. She
gives a very tightly controlled performance, and with this film she has
picked up her
third Academy Award nomination. (She was previously nominated for The
Madness of King George and Gosford Park.) Her performance makes
The Queen a truly outstanding film.
Sofia
Coppola’s third feature film shows definite growth, although the end result
certainly is disappointing compared with her very successful Lost in
Translation. Although she used Tokyo as a vivid backdrop, Lost in
Translation was primarily a two-person drama. Here her vision is more
ambitious, with a cast that may not have actually gotten into the thousands
but certainly reached well into the hundreds. Coppola was allowed to film in
Versailles itself, and Marie Antoinette provides a rich visual
spectacle that clearly gives the audience the look of the eighteenth-century
world of Marie Antoinette. The film hammers home its point about the
parallel between eighteenth- and twentieth-century celebrity indulgence, but
the price is an almost endless parade of contemporary songs that take the
audience out of the period the film has worked so hard to portray visually.
Although the cast is filled with the names of well-known actors and
actresses, Coppola’s script doesn’t give them much to do. It probably
doesn’t help that the characters being portrayed, with a few exceptions such
as King Louis XV (Rip Torn) and Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), are largely
unfamiliar to American audiences. The audience may easily become distracted
trying to recognize the high-profile actors under the impressive wigs and
inside the lavish costumes. The result is a spectacular and a fairly lively
pageant of the French court with little effective character development.
Jason Schwartzman’s King Louis XVI is a particularly weak character. While
one suspects that Louis XVI was indeed a weak king, Schwartzman’s portrayal
is extremely flat. Since his first film appearance in Rushmore,
Schwartzman seems to have struggled to find roles that fit him as well as
that one did. A romantic liaison with Swedish Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan) is
squandered as just a hedonistic dalliance. The real Count Fersen did later
attempt to rescue Marie Antoinette and her family. Kirsten Dunst works quite
hard to make very human a queen who had been demonized as a monster. Her
Marie Antoinette is a flawed woman, but no monster. One suspects that she
was overwhelmed with the contradictory expectations of duty and celebrity
indulgence. She had neither her own acumen for political survival nor anyone
at court capable of effectively advising her. Dunst, unfortunately, has no
suitable foil to breathe dramatic life into the film.
The Queen
1/2
Marie
Antoinette
