Napoleon
Almost all great historical movies, especially those of the big-budget roadshow variety popular during 1950s and ’60s, disregard fact for the sake of entertainment. Spartacus, Braveheart, Gladiator, Ben-Hur, and Dunkirk are but a few lauded examples that play fast and loose with fact for one reason or another. Why Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has being singled out for this, is beyond me. There are far more important issues that scupper Napoleon’s chances of cinematic greatness.
Exploring an intensely complex and momentous period from 1789 to 1815, Napoleon is nothing if not ambitious. A good comparison in terms of scope would be Ken Hughes’ 1970 epic, Cromwell. A film with a fiery conflict at its heart between Richard Harris and Alec Guinness, condensing many years of crucial history into two hours and twenty minutes, whilst being chiefly concerned with character exploration. Largely, it succeeds (despite squashing three civil wars into one).
It becomes clear almost immediately how briskly Napoleon intends to move through important events. Yes, there’s a lot to get through, but there’s so little effort to communicate their significance. Again, as Scott would be more than happy to remind everyone, Napoleon is not a history lesson, but the proceedings are plagued with a troubling weightlessness. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone picking out a biography from the history section in Waterstones and reading aloud the contents page. Even when relishing in showing the sumptuously mounted battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo, Scott never establishes a firm sense of consequence beyond what audiences may or may not already know. This lack of exploration unfortunately, also extends to its central characters.
The eponymous emperor has been portrayed many times on the big screen, arguably the two most prominent being Marlon Brando in the lavish if unremarkable Désirée (1954), and Rod Steiger in the Soviet-Italian epic Waterloo (1970). Steiger, for me, remains the best on-screen Bonaparte, embodying all his complexities and passions with an affecting world-weariness. Beyond his ferocious yearning for Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine, Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is something of an empty vessel, drifting from one fleeting event to the next with no clear grasp of his motivations, ambitions, or the tenacious drive fuelling his conquests. Save for the Battle of Austerlitz, there’s painfully little sense of his battlefield genius. Phoenix rarely emotes, save for two admittedly excellent scenes. Beyond that, there’s an awful lot of lock-jawed delivery and protracted stone-faced silences without much going on behind the eyes. Vanessa Kirby is greatly underutilised but makes the best of what little there is, providing most of the palpable emotion on offer. Rupert Everett’s Duke of Wellington has the appropriate panache for a nemesis, but he appears too late for any meaningful dynamic to flourish.
The costumes and combat sequences are a feast for the eyes, but aside from a handful of shots in Egypt and the two major battles, Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography fails to make the most of its visual splendour. The soundtrack too is often unnoteworthy, especially when compared with the adrenaline-pumping delights of Gladiator.
I desperately wanted to like Napoleon, especially given the favourable comparisons to old-fashioned epics of classic Hollywood. Sadly, this lacks many of the fundamental ingredients that make even the lesser films of that period engaging. I was made to feel uncomfortably nostalgic for one of Scott’s previous epics Exodus: Gods and Kings. If you’re looking for some insight into the man, or even a fictionalised version that serves the director’s interpretation, I’m afraid Napoleon will disappoint.
2/5
