Photo © Sony Pictures
Napoleon film still
Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby in ‘Napoleon’
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica to an impoverished family of minor nobility. Sent to military school in France, he was poor and picked on, and spoke French with a funny accent all his life. And yet, in a story of upward mobility to rival Abraham Lincoln’s ascent from the log cabin, he rose through the ranks, crowning himself Emperor of the French.
With Napoleon, director Ridley Scott compacts a large history into nearly three hours. The film begins with Marie Antoinette, deposed and led before a crowd calling for her head. Was Bonaparte really present in that crowd, watching her execution without emotion as seen in the film? Who knows? Did Bonaparte really pry open the tomb of a pharaoh and press his head against the mummy’ face, as if waiting for a word of wisdom? Well, he did have pharaonic self-regard and saw himself as following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
Despite artistic license in the service of storytelling, Napoleon correctly traces the arc of its subject’s career. Bonaparte became prominent during the high fever of the French Revolution by recapturing the port of Toulon, occupied by hostile British forces. Bonaparte’s strategic genius is revealed in quick strokes. He could visualize the totality of his tactics the way an artist imagines the finished picture.
Like many revolutions to follow, the French Revolution consumed itself in a Reign of Terror led by self-righteous maniacs convinced that their ideology was the key to Utopia. What did Bonaparte think of the Revolution he served? The screenplay implies his complete indifference to its ideas, yet in reality he was feared by conservatives across Europe as an agent of progress—before he was condemned as an autocrat. He orders his troops to fire on royalist protestors and a few years later he made himself emperor. Bonaparte was a man of contradictions left unexplained by Napoleon.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte through much of the movie with stolid, unblinking countenance, a face fit for a marble bust or a coin that comes up heads. It’s as if the actor tried to understand Bonaparte by staring at his official portrait and sought to humanize him only as the randy and jealous husband of Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In those scenes, Bonaparte’s ego is too large for their bedchamber.
Is that the sum of Bonaparte’s life? He certainly saw himself as a man of destiny, but Napoleon endows him no psychological dimension. Was his conquest of Europe nothing more than the will to power on a mammoth scale?
Hubris brought him down, as Napoleon does show. Regarding the Russians as Asiatic savages, he led his Grand Army toward that vast nation’s ever-receding horizon. His forces were dogged by guerilla attacks along the way, and when he reached Moscow, he found an empty Kremlin and an abandoned city. “Where are you?” a frustrated Bonaparte cries out inside the Kremlin’s cavernous great hall in one of the film’s cinematic moments. The tsar and his subjects had left—and then they set the city on fire, forcing Bonaparte to retreat in the face of an icy Russian winter. He invaded Russia with an army of 600,000. Only 40,000 survived.
Even after being deposed, Bonaparte wasn’t finished. His Waterloo was yet to come, and he ended his life as a British prisoner, confined to St. Helena, a rock in the mid-Atlantic.
Although never flagrantly inaccurate about the important episodes, Napoleon’s screenplay (by David Scarpa) glosses over many conquests and hits several wrong notes (No one at Waterloo asked about anyone’s “estimated time of arrival”) and its occasional attempts at humor are clumsy as a tired horse. Bonaparte’s story might be told better as a multi-episode streaming series starring a lead actor with a more interesting take on the role than Phoenix. Ridley Scott startled the world with Alien (1979) and his prescient Blade Runner (1982), but since then has enjoyed a career marked more with mediocrity than greatness. Next up for him, another historical fiction, this time a sequel, Gladiator 2.
