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Contradictory Impressions Temper a Shrewd Napoleon


I guess this is what you have to expect when you let an Englishman make a movie about France’s most famous military leader.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is in many ways an only halfway serious take on the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, here played by Joaquin Phoenix. It just as often is focused on the quirks of an awkward character as it is the historical record of his reign and influence on France and Europe. A characterization that is very deliberate if not in all likelihood authentic -indeed the movie has a very loose relationship with the details of historical accuracy, as is not at all surprising when it comes to Scott, routinely more interested in history as a tapestry and source of epic storytelling than a document to be closely adhered to. It has been both a benefit and detriment to his films on the subject; and in Napoleon it seems to be both at the same time -a movie that conjures up a portrait of an iconic historical figure through a curious new lens yet in so doing tempers its own gravity and sense of scale.
It’s strange to say of a movie that is over two and a half hours, but Napoleon often seems harried as it tries to fit in every major touchstone of Napoleon’s career while also devoting ample time over to his personal relationship with his first wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). It’s something that was not a problem to Abel Gance, whose innovative five and a half hour 1927 film still may be considered the most comprehensive cinematic exploration of Napoleon, and which was likely an influence (in reputation at least) on Scott’s own movie. His scope is severely more limited and simplified, even compared to his other historical epics; and while part of this comes from the almost episodic style with which he presents Napoleon’s life -outside of battles never dwelling too long on a particular moment- a lot of it comes down to his and Joaquin Phoenix’s particular approach to the character of Napoleon.
To put it bluntly, Napoleon is a dork, and a very emphatically insecure dork at that. A brilliant tactician, sure -on the battlefield he is incredibly shrewd and cunning- but incompetent and awkward in just about every other facet of life, boiling over into the temperamental with time but never really maturing. Phoenix plays him as downright shy when he first meets Joséphine, and while he clearly looks much older than Kirby, he strikes the disposition of a teenage boy intimidated by an older more sexually experienced woman (Joséphine was six years Napoleon’s senior). And all through their subsequent relationship he’s incredibly awkward -their sexual encounters are hysterically passionless, his delusion over her love and fidelity a great joke in its own right, and his obsession on her conceiving a male heir is played with a real pathetic stubbornness. Scott and Phoenix’s Napoleon is a man beset by sexual insecurity, who cannot pleasure yet is completely dependent on his wife, and takes out these frustrations militarily on Europe. He is a fundamentally weak man.
And in his public political characterization these traits manifest in a glaringly familiar way. He is entitled, a whiner (at one point he complains to the British, “you think you are so great because you have boats”), sensitive to criticism, egotistical, and ostentatious about his own greatness in history -he at one point likens himself to Alexander the Great, and when compared by his brother to Julius Caesar he is easily persuaded to join the 1799 coup -a coup that involves the disruption of a government action and Napoleon lying to his supporters, before the government itself is cornered at gunpoint. I don’t know that Scott is directly using Napoleon as a satirical avatar for Trump, but there are certainly elements of Trumpism that consciously find their way into the movie.
It wouldn’t be the first time for Scott; Kingdom of Heaven, one of his greatest films, is also less an accurate account of the Crusades than it is a metaphor for the invasion of Iraq and the larger post-9/11 Middle East conflict. He seems to have a fascination with historical patterns repeating themselves. But Napoleon is less successful in this regard, because Scott chooses to present him as both this dim impulsive loser and as a strategic genius. Scott can never resist an elaborate period set-piece and indeed his battle sequences are high points for the film -specifically Austerlitz and Waterloo. The former really leans on both Napoleon’s commanding power and his intelligent tactics, a contradiction in poise to the figure who sulks at the dinner table over the insinuation he is impotent. Scott wants us to see Napoleon as both strong and weak, powerful and pitiable. But he’s unable to reconcile these contrasts on screen.
Still, Napoleon as a movie is characterized by Scott’s usual flare for practical scale and exceptional stamina for a director in his mid-eighties. Much as the period accuracy leaves a lot to be desired, the film looks real, it’s world utterly palpable. And yet it also looks dry, shot often with a dour atmosphere, a pale colour scheme that deafens at times some of the intriguing cinematography of Dariusz Wolski. And this is not a movie where Scott can use the realism excuse for some of these choices -it clearly didn’t bother him elsewhere. The one real exception is the coronation scene, with opaque overcast lighting and framing so as to resemble Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the occasion –the onlookers in shadow as Napoleon is spotlit in all his fineries. If more of the movie adopted this aesthetic it might not have been very versatile, but would have made for a more visually captivating piece.  There are still moments here and there that look great –Napoleon’s journey to Egypt for instance (Scott is generally more expressive in deserts than in Europe), but it altogether is a bit dreary, especially compared to other grand epics from this year like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Napoleon is engaging enough though, if for nothing else than the invigorating curiosity of its portrait. Phoenix’s Napoleon will never be mistaken for the real figure’s romanticized stature in history, but he makes for a relevant, even useful observation. And where Scott’s fidelity might be criticized, his techniques are still laudable, especially where it concerns those grandiose set-pieces. But the film is hindered by its mixed narratives and by the bleak dullness to a lot of its imagery. There is an emptiness in stretches of it, absent from most of Scott’s other period pieces. This is a movie bent on, at least to some extent, tearing down Napoleon’s grandeur -it is ironically fitting that it also can’t quite muster that grandeur itself.

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