94% The Queen of Versailles

All Critics (85) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (79) | Rotten (5)

Seriously, if this was the American Dream, couldn't we have come up with something better?

"The Queen of Versailles" is funny, sad, infuriating, instructive. It's the American Dream inflated to ridiculous extremes, until it bursts.

More than a social morality tale, this is a character study, with the title well chosen.

"The Queen of Versailles" ought to be required viewing for anyone who blames the rich for yanking the rug out from under America's economy.

By the end, the movie has pulled off a small miracle: You become absorbed in the lives of these people for who they are and not what they own.

What I left with was not hatred. I disapprove of the values they represent, but I also find them fascinating and just slightly lovable.

Prepare to be shocked, disgusted and compelled.

In the end, these are human beings, not emblems - and it is this that makes this documentary one of the most watchable, for rich and poor alike.

A bizarre and mesmerising journey to the heart of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

It is a comedy that aspires to tragedy, and a metaphor for a nation collapsing beneath the incompatible, intolerable pressures of excess and inequity.

For all their garishness, the Siegels are pretty likable, even if attempts to make you sympathetic to their "plight" fall short.

It scores a lot of laughs at the Siegel's bad taste and odd ways of adapting to their newfound misfortune. Thankfully, Greenfield also makes the Siegels sympathetic.

If you get some kind of sick kick watching the mighty take a fall, The Queen of Versailles will be nothing short of a schadenfreudic ball.

It contains some useful information, I suppose, but I did not like these people, I hope never to meet them, and I wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place without them.

Watching Jackie fill cart after Walmart cart with crap the family doesn't need is to witness the new millennium's version of Marie Antoinette.

Can we feel sorry for super-filthy-rich rich people? Maybe not. But we can be fascinated by their insane spending. Lauren Greenfield gains uber-access to the excess.

Although director Lauren Greenfield documents several instances in which it's apparent that the Siegels' lifestyle is so alien from the vast majority that they might as well call Mars home, she hasn't set out to eat the rich.

Greenfield and her crew achieved extraordinary access to the Siegel's lives, and one of the film's pleasures is simply getting to visit a world that few of us will ever know.

Although it's a guilty pleasure, "The Queen of Versailles" is artful enough that both the prosecution and the defense could invoke it when the peasants cry "Off with their heads!"

At times the film feels aimless and inconclusive, but Greenfield's open-minded and observational approach yields compelling details from every scene.

Taken at face value, The Queen of Versailles reveals nothing about the rich that isn't plainly evident on the E! Network. But its most surprising quality is also Jackie's: endurance.

This rags-to-riches-to-almost-rags-again queen has an endearing knack for looking on the bright side. You find yourself, by the end, wishing her well.

A portrait of the American Dream gone sour so absurdly engaging that you might be ashamed of enjoying it so much.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_queen_of_versailles/

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