Napoleon Bonaparte has been featured in films for nearly 100 years (going back to Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, which clocked in at about 5.5 hours), but I can’t remember a time when he was portrayed as a butt-hurt little man-child with a ego so fragile a stiff wind would fracture it. Yet here we are with 2023’s Napoleon (only 2.5 hours), under the watchful eye of director Ridley Scott, and performed as a constipated, squishy-faced, moody baby by Joaquin Phoenix. I have no doubt that this is exactly the version of the French emperor that Scott and Phoenix wanted on the screen, but I found his performance brutally one-dimensional with barely a thought given to how he may have turned out that way or whether his adult life in any way shaped or altered his behavior.
As a character study of Napoleon, the film is a failure; but that’s not all Napoleon is. It’s also a character study of his wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who is the true centerpiece of this film, if we’re all being honest. We see where she comes from, how she is looked down upon for her past and what she did to stay alive during some of France’s darkest days. Napoleon saw her as a prize, something to possess, and she is willing to play along with his obsession with dominating her as long as it keeps her and her children alive and comfortable. Without looking too hard, we’re able to understand her motivations, and that’s largely because of a sympathetic script by David Scarpa and Kirby’s powerhouse performance.
We also grow to understand that Josephine is a woman with needs, and when Napoleon is off on one of his many military campaigns, she takes a lover and gets caught, with Napoleon notoriously leaving a frontline in Egypt to go deal with his cheating wife. When she asks him if he’s had affairs too, he responds “Of course,” as if he’s only done so because a leader as powerful as him is expected to. It’s one of many double standards Josephine has to learn to navigate over the course of their marriage.
The other thing Napoleon is, is the occasional action movie, with all of the battles shot practically (rather than created on a computer). One thing director Scott has always excelled at is staged, large battle scenes in ways that make sense to the audience, both geographically and strategically. And there are several here, perhaps none more well done than the climactic battle of Waterloo, in which the returned-from-exile dictator goes against England’s army under the command of the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) and the Prussian army. The sequence is handled in such as way that you can feel Napoleon’s unwarranted confidence that he will win the battle, as he has done so many times before. But Wellington’s almost apathetic feelings on the skirmish make it clear he’s going to take the day without breaking a sweat worrying about the outcome.
We do get to see Napoleon the diplomat as well, and I especially enjoyed the meetings between him and Russia’s young Tsar Alexander (Edouard Philipponnat), whose desire to see the two as friends or even brothers masks a fairly ruthless statesman underneath.
Still, very little about Napoleon’s role as a military general, dictator, husband or politician does much to round out the character as played by Phoenix, who is fully capable of richly emoting when he damn well feels like it. It just doesn’t seem like he cares much about the figure he’s playing here. We meet him as a member of the crowd gathered around a guillotine to watch Marie Antoinette lose her head in 1793, but what are we meant to learn from this? That he hated the rich? Or that he learned not to behave as the rich do, even though he very much wanted the power that unlimited wealth could bring you?
I’m probably putting more thought into this than the filmmakers, but the elements are there for a much better film if they were just assembled in a meaningful or thoughtful way. That being said, word on the street is that when the film debuts on Apple TV+, it will be the director’s four-hour cut, which I would very much like to see, because I have a feeling some of my issues with the film will be addressed and course corrected. Or it will be a much longer version of the same, problematic movie. As with history, time will tell.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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