Napoleon
Ridley Scott's epic misfire loses the plot.
Nobody expects historical nuance from the filmmaker who made Gladiator and won a boatload of Oscars for it, but one might still reasonably have hoped that a Ridley Scott movie about one of the most controversial figures in European history would have other charms. Napoleon has arrived as a sort of monkey’s-paw fulfillment of such hopes. The film has spectacular battle scenes, which are presented mostly without the context that would clarify their emotional and narrative stakes. It has Joaquin Phoenix, but it strands him in a murkily written role. It has colorful dialogue, pitched at a level that seems calculated for maximal meme-ability. “Dispiriting” isn’t an adjective one would expect to apply to a Ridley Scott movie about Napoleon Bonaparte, yet here we are.
Drawing from the Wikipedia-synopsis approach favored by biopics such as Bohemian Rhapsody and The Iron Lady, Napoleon takes the audience on a whirlwind tour through the military career of Le Petit Caporal, beginning with his role in the revolution that toppled the French monarchy and ending with his death in exile thirty years later. That is a vast expanse of time for a biopic about anyone, let alone one of the most influential people of his century. The attempt here by Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa (All the Money in the World) offers scant insight into Napoleon himself or the forces around him, instead settling for a checklist of Napoleon’s most famous exploits: a little revolutionary politicking here, a bit of invading Russia there, a generous dash of Waterloo toward the end. The chronological gaps in between are occupied by the stormy domestic drama between Napoleon and his first wife, Josephine, a storytelling choice that is Scott and Scarpa’s primary innovation. In their retelling, the fire that drove Napoleon forward was fueled by a comically intense desire for Josephine: her approval, her body, and her ability to conceive an heir to his imperial dynasty.
This idea would provide a solid frame for an Armando Iannucci–style satire of how the course of history is often steered by the absurd pettiness of the powerful, and the sillier business that this Napoleon gets up to—such as pawing the ground and whinnying in Josephine’s bedchamber like a randy stallion—suggests that Scott was aiming for something along those lines. Unfortunately, Scott enjoys spectacle too much to commit fully to a puncturing of historical grandeur. His visually and aurally impressive depictions of the battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo sweep the audience up in awe of the scale and the violence of such clashes, and a closing title card soberly takes stock of the hundreds of thousands who were killed during Napoleon’s campaigns. A deft touch is necessary to bring these two disparate tones into harmony, but Napoleon doesn’t have it. The slaughtered war dead become just one facet of Napoleon and Josephine’s marital misadventures; Napoleon and Josephine’s head-scratching romance is given the same stature as seismic shifts in geopolitics. Thrown into the same pot, it all swirls together into one over-seasoned soup.
Joaquin Phoenix fares poorly at the center of all the chaos. Tasked with playing a character who is both a buffoonish cuckold and a calculating genius of the battlefield, Phoenix gives a performance that varies wildly depending on the demands of any given scene, perhaps having faith that his director would be able to stitch it all together in a way that made sense. Phoenix supplies a few illuminating grace notes for his character—the younger Napoleon plugs his ears against the roar of battlefield artillery, while the older Napoleon doesn’t bother—but this ends up highlighting the overall scarcity of such characterization.
As Josephine, Vanessa Kirby faces an even steeper uphill battle. Here, Josephine is a formidable woman whose captivating deeds at soirees and in bedrooms unite politics and self-interest, but Scarpa’s script presents her only as the idea of such a woman rather than as a flesh-and-blood person. Kirby’s performance has a feline inscrutability that suits the material well, but the movie ends before we’re able to get a sense of what lies beneath the facade.
This storytelling ungainliness might be forgivable in a film with a more interesting perspective on its characters, but underneath its surface-level outrageousness, Scott’s film doesn’t have one. This Napoleon is basically the same neurotic whose detractors named an entire inferiority complex after him. There are interesting questions to ask about the couple at the center of Napoleon, but Scott leaves them all on the table. What was the nature of Napoleon’s ambition toward greatness? How did his ambitions evolve after meeting Josephine? What exactly did Josephine see in this strange man, that she would tolerate his peccadilloes and link her fate to his? Perhaps this is why Phoenix and Kirby seem a bit lost onscreen: they may have been unsure exactly what kind of movie Ridley Scott was making. One sympathizes. —Kevin McLenithan
★☆☆☆
Napoleon is currently in theatrical wide release.