Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles, Matthew Needham, Paul Rhys
Stanley Kubrick spent much of his career obsessing over a biopic of
Napoleon Bonaparte that ultimately never got made due to his insistence on
perfectionism. Early in his career, Ridley Scott was viewed as a
similarly controlling filmmaker but as he's aged and become more aware of
his limited remaining time in this world, Scott has been churning out movies
at a prolific rate. Kubrick couldn't make a Napoleon movie in his four
decade career but Scott has managed to knock one out just two years after
his 2021 double whammy of
House of Gucci
and
The Last Duel.
Kubrick's home was said to have an entire room dedicated to his extensive
research on the French emperor. Scott's film suggests he has no more than a
dog-eared biography on his bedside locker. Like Baz Luhrmann's
Elvis, Scott's Napoleon focusses on the myth over the man, and has
little interest in historical accuracy. Unlike Luhrmann's film, Scott's is
highly entertaining.
With
Patriots Day, Peter Berg was widely mocked for making it seem like a cop played by Mark
Wahlberg was the central figure of the events following the 2013 Boston
marathon bombing. But Berg's approach worked for those viewers who wanted an
easily digested thriller rather than a detailed and factually accurate
account of real life events. The same can be said for Napoleon, which compresses a time in French history that was so eventful it could
never be detailed in a single film. Napoleon wasn't present at the
guillotining of Marie Antoinette and he never fired at the pyramids, but
Scott knows that most of his audience won't care, and such images are a
shortcut to creating a sketch of the man and his time rather than a complete
portrait. When you get to Scott's age you likely favour doodles over
portraits whose paint might not have dried by the time you depart.
Napoleon is played in caricature form by Joaquin Phoenix, the latest
in his line of socially awkward schlemiels. It's an anti-hagiography in the
manner of Oliver Stone's W, but we're never given an idea of how this awkward little man was able to
hold a nation and its armies in his thrall. His great love Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is reduced to an opportunistic gold-digger. But Phoenix and Kirby are so
watchable that it's hard to care about any lack of fealty to the
truth.
Phoenix's Napoleon is a cuckold who is constantly publicly embarrassed by
his wife's infidelity and her inability to bear a child, but any time he
attempts to confront her on such matters she becomes a dominatrix who makes
him feel like a pathetic little boy who can't live without her. Their
bickering is hilarious, chiefly because Napoleon knows he can never gain the
upper hand with this cunning woman.
The emperor presents a far more confident front in his dealings with his
enemies, perhaps drawing inspiration from his wife's treatment of himself in
how he arrogantly lords it over foreign rulers whose lands he has
subjugated. To the powerful in France it's something of an embarrassment
that this common Corsican has risen so steadily, and so he's exiled as soon
as he makes his first error, only to stage a remarkable comeback, a
resurrection that will likely be referenced by political commentators when
Trump inevitably wins the next US election.
Now an octogenarian, Scott has lost no appetite for staging elaborate and
massive battle scenes. The battle of Austerlitz is up there with the best of
Scott's set-pieces, with cannonballs ripping through men and horses alike
and creating holes in a frozen lake, leading to an icy death for thousands
of men. The grand climax is the battle of Waterloo, which famously proved
Napoleon's...well, his Waterloo. As bodies pile up and men roll around in
agony with limbs barely hanging on, the folly of following a charismatic
leader is made painfully clear. While such grand battles can often be
confusing, a blur of bloodied bodies, Scott makes it visually clear how the
British defeated Napoleon through clever military formations.
Scott has teased a longer cut when the film debuts on streaming service
Apple TV+. Perhaps that version will provide more insight into its subject
matter, but I highly doubt Scott has left much in the way of character
building on the cutting room floor for this initial release. If you want to
learn about Napoleon, pick up a book or watch a documentary. If you want a
historical romp that's as bawdy as it is bloody, Scott's film is a pleasing
diversion.
