New York Dispatch. 4.

There's a crucial moment in The Queen, which opened the New York Film Festival Friday night, when the British royal family agrees reluctantly that Diana, Princes of Wales, will receive a public funeral after her death in a 1997 car crash in Paris with her lover, the Egyptian playboy Dodi al-Fayed. When an aide in the remote Scottish castle of Balmoral where the royals are holed up explains that the funeral will take place in a particular church according to an existing plan, the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) looks up indignantly from her drink and says, "But that's the plan for my funeral." Indeed it was. The dead Diana had usurped the position of the moribund irrelevant royals who had scorned her. Dying was Diana's shrewdest career move. The event turned out to be just the opposite for the Queen.

There's another key moment, also involving the Queen Mother, who is with her daughter, Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren), when the guest list for the funeral is discussed: entertainers, actors, fashion designers, even Elton John. "Celebrities," one of them hisses, impervious to what should have been painfully clear at that moment, that the royal family are now celebrities among many others, only less popular.

Timing, even if you're a queen, is everything, and The Queen focuses on a moment when the royals should have been warned that their time of favor would pass if they failed to show some humanity and appear to share the grief that so many British felt when Diana was killed. Stubborn and isolated in Scotland, the Queen miscalculates, and the newspapers put her aloofness all over the tabloid covers. All of this happens just as Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), dazed from a landslide Labour victory, seizes the upper hand with his public mourning of the "People's Princess," a zinger tear-jerk line handed to him by his in-house flack. Oh, Lucky Man.

Stephen Frears's film does what TV drama does best in dissecting a time with a convincing degree of verisimilitude and a plausible degree of analysis, with the pro forma intercut news footage. Thatcherism had exhausted its very long fifteen minutes - more like fifteen years, and the simple answer that Blair brought was that Britain needed "reinvigoration." But Frears does it one better than simply making the solidly competent British docu-drama. His cast lifts the whole project to another level, with Mirren as a monarch stewing in melancholy and Sheen as the lucky plucky Blair, who's more than smart enough to know that he hasn't much of a clue as to what to do now that he's won the job of Prime Minister. Add the car crash that transformed Diana from a glam socialite into saint and martyr, and you've got a national saga. You can't name a time that wasn't covered by the press the way this was, but Frears and his cast get the details and performances right to make it seem fresh again rather than just overexposed. He has enough empathy for the royals to make their emotions matter.

If you've watched Mirren, you know that she's good in just about anything, and keeps getting better. (You have to wonder what historical figure she'll play twenty years from now.) Yet playing a historical figure, especially a living one, is more than acting a part with a telling line or two and the right clothes. She turns Elizabeth II into a portrait of frustration, a woman who despised the young breeding cow who wouldn't stay in her place, and despises her son, Charles, who couldn't keep Diana in check. In a time of national mourning, the Queen, like any leader, could have seized the tragic moment of Diana's death and marshaled the sentiments of the public that, for better or worse, sought her guidance. Every smart politician knows that people think with their feelings. Yet all she could marshal were the Corgis on her estate, smug in her rebuke over the phone to the callow Blair that she "knew the British people better than anyone." The price she paid for her mistake was, at best, a confirmation of her irrelevance, or worse, the growing public perception that their monarch simply didn't care about a funeral for the mother of her grandchildren. When she reads a Blair-written script of sympathy on television at the new prime minister's behest, it's too late. It's also too late for her to have much credibility at the film's end when she warns Blair that his own honeymoon could vanish unexpectedly, as we've seen in the last two years. (Here Frears, the dutiful Labourite, seems to be fast-forwarding us to the present.) A broken queen, like a broken clock, is still right twice a day.

The Queen will inevitably be compared  to another film that's bound to get a huge amount of attention at the NYFF, Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola's period pageant about the French queen with the quote heard round the world, "Let them eat cake." Forget about any direct parallels between then and now, as much as the film wants you to see them. The Marie-Antoinette of our day might be Nancy Reagan or Katherine ("let them eat hanging chads") Harris. But Coppola's movie, taking its zany liberties with anything historical, couldn't be more different than Frears's studied recreation of his characters' voices and personal quirks.

Let's make one thing clear. This movie is absurd. It is blithely inane. It's also riotously funny, although I don't think that any of the things that made me laugh were intended as humor. Don't let that stop you from seeing it. Unintentional humor can be the best kind. Just watch a Bush press conference.

In Coppola's view of the past, Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is a simple Austrian girl - pretty, of course; this is a movie, after all - bartered off to the French crown to strengthen an alliance - a martyrdom foretold. She even has to give up her Austrian dog in the deal. If that isn't suffering, I don't know what is, but bear in mind that aristocrats in those days didn't marry for love.

Not only is the king (Jason Schwartzman) shorter and chubbier than she, but he couldn't care less about sex, which means that it takes poor Marie years to bear an heir, giving us scenes of denied fulfillment that could bring tears to the eyes of InStyle readers, for whom Marie Antoinette seems to be intended. In the film, we're not even sure the king's the father.

Kirsten Dunst, as the princess turned queen, observes everything in the measured tones of your average mall shopper from Versailles, Indiana (it's "let them, like, eat cake," while everyone else in the dream-team cast at Versailles speaks as if this is Masterpiece Theater). Coppola seems determined to make this adaptation of Marie-Antoinette bio "contemporary" - a tale of a nice-enough Austrian girl constrained by the country that has now become the enemy of all things American, France.

Think of this Marie-Antoinette as a common-sense Tammy or Gidget in the early 1960s, with a plain-spoken "wit" that sees through all the frilly pretense at the court. (But if you want a real Martian-looking-at-society tale, you're much better off with Borat) It's the kind of homespun wisdom that Americans like about themselves, although it doesn't have much to do with late 18th century France.

Perhaps I'm being too much of a stickler to expect any historical accuracy, or even any history, from a period drama that's targeting the shopping crowd. (This isn't Tristram Shandy.) After all, we live in a country where a huge percentage of the population couldn't tell you where Iraq is and still believes that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. And we have a president who couldn't put his finger on Iran on a globe ten years ago. So Sofia Coppola plays it loose with history. But she doesn't take the same obvious shorcuts with the film's costumes, by Milena Canonero. They're lavish and, to my eye, close enough in keeping with the period, and they seem to be the result of painstaking research on the part of the costume department. In a recent issue of Vogue, some 20 pages were devoted to gowns for Marie Antoinette, all of them the creations of the world's top designers (Galliano, McQueen, etc.), all of them worn by Kirsten Dunst, all there to get Vogue readers into the film at least once.

We reach a certain paradox here with Sofia Coppola's movie. We are meant to feel some sympathy when the revolutionaries (in rags, not gowns) storm Versailles and Marie-Antoinette is carted away with all her family to be executed. (I have to say that, by this point in the movie, I was thinking that there was nothing wrong with this story that a guillotine couldn't solve.) We are meant to feel sympathy for the unfortunate queen, since the assumption is that she is heading for an undeserved death. On the other hand, the filmmakers seem to be eager to exploit the myth of Marie-Antoinette to sell dresses or pictures of those dresses (or just the movie) to the would-be Marie-Antoinettes of the early 21st century. Is this a case of having one's cake and eating it too? More on all this to come in a later dispatch.

In my last dispatch, I failed to note that Rialto Pictures will be releasing the long-forgotten 1962 classic Mafioso theatrically in January. Don't miss it.

Posted by dwhudson at October 1, 2006 5:28 AM