Napoleon (Ridley Scott, 2023)
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a biopic, with some odd elements, but also an epic historical drama, that works best as solid meat-and-potatoes entertainment for folks who enjoy historical action dramas.
It’s not a great movie by any standards, at least not in its current 2 1/2 hour form. Scott has already said that his director’s cut, that will premiere on Apple next year, will be about a hundred minutes longer.
That version will probably be superior to the theatrical one, simply because it will fill in the parts that are missing in action in this one.
Still, I enjoyed catching Napoleon while it’s still in theaters, mainly because Scott is an extremely talented director, whose movies work best on the big screen.
And yes, at his best, Ridley Scott is one of our greatest living directors. He is also the guy who made two masterpieces early on in his career, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), and then spent the next couple of decades trying to live up to that (already impressive) legacy.
But now we have come so far that his good & great movies form such an impressive body of work that the hits (Gladiator, Thelma & Louise, American Gangster, The Martian and my personal favorite Matchstick Men) easily outweigh all the (near) misses in between.
Now let me jump into Napoleon, in the same abrupt way that Scott does in the theatrical version of his movie about the life and times of the legendary French emperor, who lived from 1769 until 1821.
At times it feels like Scott and writer David Scarpa have taken Napoleon’s Wikipedia-entry as their starting point, left out a lot of stuff, and instead added bits of fake news to make it all seem more interesting. Therefore the movie opens with the execution of Marie-Antoinette, but with Napoleon in attendance, for which there is no proof. But you never know…
Later on, Napoleon is seen leading his army into Egypt and firing his cannons at the pyramids, like we all would given half a chance. If we were fools. And there are plenty of other creative liberties too, that don’t really harm the movie and draw the viewer in. Unless you’re French, of course, then you take it all rather personal.
A more serious criticism could be that Napoleon, played by Joaquin Phoenix, throughout the movie comes off as a rather one-dimensional character, who only loved three things: France, the army and Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Napoleon was (supposed to be) a military genius, but the movie just presents this as a fact, but never elaborates on it.
Apparently, Napoleon saw himself as a worthy successor to Julius Caesar and Alexander The Great, but what we see is a strongman, who strong-armed his way into French politics during the French Revolution (1789-1799). He could have died early on at the Battle of Toulon - one of the 61 battles he fought leading to in all 3 million deaths - but he survived to become ruler of the French empire. Well, until his ill-fated March on Moscow and the battle of Waterloo, where to paraphrase ABBA ‘he was defeated and Wellington won the war’.
The movie inelegantly jumps forward in time, until the final part, when it settles into a more predictable groove, ending with Napoleon’s final banishment to Sint Helena.
Still, you can count on Scott to deliver the goods when it comes to action scenes, and the half dozen battles in the movie are absolutely worth it, in terms of pure entertainment value. Especially the one on the ice. You’ll see it when you get there.
Phoenix and Scott worked together before on Gladiator (2000), and his role as Napoleon seems a continuation of his role as the preening, insecure emperor Commodus in that Oscar-winning movie.
Napoleon is also portrayed as a powerful yet very insecure man, who keeps on fighting and killing to compensate for that insecurity. I thought about Putin a couple of times while watching Napoleon, and how we have entered into a time where democracy is once again in danger and strongmen rule the day.
However, behind a strongman there’s at least sometimes a strong woman, and in this case that’s Josephine de Beauharnais. The movie spends an extraordinary amount of time with Napoleon and the love of his life. So much so, that at times it’s like we are watching some rather contemporary relationship drama.
I’m sure Napoleon loved the aristocratic Josephine, while she probably loved him for his power and position, which gave her the security she needed for herself and her children from an earlier marriage, after spending time in prison during the revolution. The fact that Josephine had affairs, just like her husband, probably fueled Napoleon’s insecurity and led to a romantic war between them, which in turn made the Emperor want to conquer even more territories.
Most of their scenes together work quite well, it just seems like they belong in a different movie. At times it’s like Scott tried to roll his last two movies, the epic drama The Last Duel and the fashion house dramady House of Gucci, into one.
I know that’s a ridiculous assumption, but the fact that I even thought such a thing, could give you a sense how odd this Napoleon movie sometimes feels.
Still, the battle scenes rock and all the effort that Scott (at age 86, no less) put into the movie has to be worth something too, like a 7 out of 10.