British men – particularly British men of a certain age and upbringing – have a fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s a begrudging respect for the military genius who came closer to conquering the British Isles than any enemy since William the Bastard. So it’s no shock that, as Ridley Scott packs what could be his retirement years with passion projects, he’s made the somewhat hagiographic Napoleon.
Similarly, filmmakers are drawn to the man who spent 20 years filling Europe’s rivers with blood. Abel Gance defined the historical epic with his 5½-hour Napoleon, while Stanley Kubrick’s ambitions for his own biopic were routed like the Russians at Smolensk. So in even broaching the subject as writer and director, Scott has something to prove.
What he proves is that he is still a great technical director of grand action, but character eludes him.
Napoleon does not cover the Nightmare of Europe’s entire life, but instead joins the 24-year-old artillery officer (played, somewhat inexplicably, by the 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix) at the height of the Reign of Terror, the rampaging bloody purges at the tail end of the French Revolution. Over 30 years, he rises to become the most powerful soldier in France, then its leader, then the dictator of Europe, until his death in exile on the rocky island of St. Helena in 1821.
As a basic if lumpen guide to the rise and fall of Le Petit Caporal – and most especially to his complicated relationship with his beloved empress, Josephine (Kirby) – Napoleon is serviceable. What’s undeniable still is Scott’s grasp of military spectacle, as previously displayed in Kingdom of Heaven and The Last Duel. He parts the fog of war just enough to reveal the grand designs at play in these muddy displays of barbarism: Napoleon’s own strategic victories in the career-defining commando raid on Toulon in 1793 and the icy bloodbath of Austerlitz in 1805, his defeat by equally cunning plans in the burning of Moscow, and his final vanquishing at Waterloo in 1815. These sequences are the equal in scale of those in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, even if Scott uses CG to create the massed conflicts rather than just putting the Soviet Army in period uniform.
But equally undeniable are the misguided decisions that cripple Scott’s own offensive, most especially in the broad humor. One fashionable interpretation of this film is that it’s a comedy: If it is, then it’s based in the abrasive satire of the era’s greatest caricaturist, James Gillray. Napoleon’s opponents – most especially Philipponnat as the preening man-child Tsar Alexander, McNeice as the corpulent King Louis XVIII, and Everett as the Duke of Wellington – are all clowns and poltroons, reducing the meaning of his victories.
But the worst miscasting is l’empereur himself. Phoenix’s biggest qualification to play the famously short Napoleon may be his height, because there’s never a moment in which he captures the ambition of the man, his ruthlessness, or his arrogance. How does a Corsican nationalist, born with the very Italian name of Napoleone Buonaparte, manage to not only rise to power in a country that has rejected monarchy but declare himself emperor? Beyond a few gasps that he pulls the crown away from the hands of the pope to coronate himself, there’s no weight to the events. Kirby’s Josephine is equally ill-served, with little insight into how the aristocratic widow of an executed traitor to la Republic not only survived but thrived. Scott seems much more eager to get to the somewhat touching, sometimes silly sex comedy between ol’ Boney and his Josephine. Try as he might to capture the political complexities of their relationship and how it was sacrificed because of the needs for an heir, Scott tells rather than shows (much as Napoleon’s much-harped-upon mommy issues turn out to be a narrative and thematic dead end). It’s all strategy, no tactics.
This article appears in November 24 • 2023.
