"Napoleon" - Film Review
Maybe it’s personal preference, but there’s something to be said about historical films and the concept of truth. Where does the line between entertainment and accuracy fall? What burden does a historical film bear when depicting real-life events? Should audiences expect to learn the truth when watching a film like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon? At times the attention to factual detail is painstakingly accurate, and at other times cannonballs are being lofted at the Egyptian pyramids. Nevertheless, Scott’s Napoleon is a sprawling biopic of one of the most famous French emperors and military commanders in history.
Napoleon begins in 1793 when Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) was an army officer during the French Revolution. The film maps his rise and fall through the 1810s, as well as his tumultuous romantic life with Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). Scott’s Napoleon doesn’t always paint the emperor, often referred to as one of the greatest military minds in history, in the kindest light. He’s a bit of a buffoon, aimlessly wandering through his personal life while conquering on the battlefield.The tide eventually turns and Napoleon is no longer the mastermind he once was, but that change is never explored. Napoleon boils the emperor’s rise to infamy down to a thirst for power, but is extremely disinterested in what that power looked like. What was life in France like under Napoleon’s rule? What led to his defeat at Waterloo? His own hubris or improvements made by other armies? Those are questions Napoleon won’t be answering.
There is something to be said for Scott’s ability to capture grand spectacle. He puts the audience in the middle of Waterloo, among the military formations, the beating hooves of horses, and the gunpowder smoke. The Battle of Austerlitz is magnificent in its brutality, and the sight of an empty, desolate Moscow burning to the ground emits a sense of immensity. It’s difficult to fathom the scale of Napoleon’s personality and the way he commanded his troops, but that is Scott’s greatest strength in this film. As with Gladiator, Blade Runner, and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Scott has an understanding of grandiose events throughout time, even if Blade Runner was fictitious. Napoleon isn’t even Scott’s first film about the French emperor. The Duellists, from 1977, took place in France during the Napoleonic Wars. Few directors understand how to capture these epic stories like Scott.
In the same breath, as epic in scale as Napoleon is, the film feels cold and removed from the man himself. Phoenix plays Napoleon in an extremely monotone, detached manner. This isn’t new territory for him, but the unfazed attitude doesn’t work within the grand scale of Napoleon. The film moves through the emperor’s life at such breakneck speed that the audience doesn’t learn much at all about him as a person. The same can be said for Joséphine in the sense that she comes across as fairly one-dimensional, but that’s not a knock on Kirby’s performance. As always, Kirby is a force of nature in every scene, but it’s not enough to lift Joséphine out of the caricature she’s been written as. Napoleon viewed their marriage as a war he would never win, but one that seemed to haunt him for his entire life. One of his final words is said to have been “Joséphine.”
As is the case with most historical films about prominent figures, Napoleon seeks to cover too much ground. Even though the movie only covers twenty(ish) years of his life, this particular time period is too full of important events and personal growth to boil down to two-and-a-half hours. Maybe it’s possible to tell the story of Napoleon’s military career and the emotional war he waged at home with Joséphine in the movie’s runtime, but that’s not the case with Napoleon. In fact, there’s something deeply, unsettlingly clinical about the film. Scott has promised that there’s a four-hour version of the film. If that happens, maybe it will allow for something, anything, remotely emotional and introspective to break through the sheen of the routine biopic that Napoleon is. As it stands now, Napoleon’s spectacle does not, and cannot, make the case for its existence.
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