Portrait of queen enlightens and entertains

Marie Antoinette
On: WGBH, Channel 2
Time: Tonight, 9-11

Marie Antoinette was the original Paris Hilton. This hall of fame airhead reveled in a world of endless parties and wore her hair three feet high. This frivolous queen of France was labeled ``Madame Deficit" for her breathtaking spending while the French people starved. If, contrary to common belief, she never said, ``Let them eat cake," she should have.

Historian Simon Schama puts it this way: ``She's got a credit card with no limit really."

And yet the queen faced trauma, too. She had the misfortune at 14 to be shipped off from her native Austria to marry the young man who would become Louis XVI of France, the king who lost his head during the French Revolution. Louis was no alpha male. It took him seven -- count 'em, seven -- years to consummate the marriage. Worse, his wife ended up losing her head too.

As queen, she became the most hated woman in France and was savaged in scurrilous pamphlets, without merit apparently, for wholesale debauchery. During her trial, she was falsely accused of incest. Along the way, she suffered at the hands of her nightmare mother, Maria Theresa, who did her level best to destroy any self-esteem the girl possessed. All in all, this is rich gruel for a biopic in the new millennium.

And Marie Antoinette is in season. Sofia Coppola's movie version of her life comes out next month, and documentarian David Grubin, no fool, exploits that buzz by airing his version of ``Marie Antoinette" tonight on PBS.

This two-hour effort, which he wrote, directed, and produced, is good entertainment and surprisingly strong history to boot. It fares well with a mix of re-creations, her own voice, and rich use of period portraits. There's also an impressive roster of A-list historians such as Schama and M.A. biographer Antonia Fraser, supported by a roster of French experts, to make a case for a more modulated portrait of the queen .

Along with her vertiginous arc, we follow the vicious political theater of the French court and the utter failure of Louis XVI to meet the growing populist threat to the crown. We see, too, the appalling blood lust and cruelty of the French Revolution that consumed its ideals and became something far uglier than apologists like Thomas Jefferson cared to admit.

``Marie Antoinette" is an openly sympathetic treatment of the queen bent on boosting her place in history. (She has nowhere to go but up.) It portrays her as a child who grows up too late, a woman who moves from clueless to regal amid the fall of the ancien régime and fecklessness of her husband. She matures in crisis and dies with dignity.

Grubin over-eggs the pudding when he presents a woman whose stoic behavior facing her demise approaches sainthood. Yes, she withstood the brutality of prison and trial with grace, but then so did a host of aristocrats. For most of her life, M.A. had neither a clue how the rest of the world lived nor the slightest interest in finding out. She was, however, charming, timelessly superficial. Fatally, she was way out of her league at Versailles and remained oblivious to the storm clouds forming around her until her fate was sealed.

So, OK, her story is touching, but Marie Antoinette will be remembered not for her grit at the end of her life but the fluff that defined the rest of it. Whatever.