Napoleon Blown Apart

“That hot Corsican blood of yours is always getting us in trouble,” Ollie says to Stan in BACON GRABBERS. The same is true of Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon Bonaparte and France in the new Ridley Scott NAPOLEON, which I finally decided to see on the big screen. I quite enjoyed it, but I couldn’t call it a successful portrayal of this figure. Put it this way, Scott’s old chum Kubrick would have HATED it.

This theatrical release is a cut-down version of something that will eventually play on Apple TV at around four hours, and I expect a lot of the issues with it will be resolved with more time to spend on the history, the characters and their relationships. What that can’t fix is the wanton distortion of history, although if more facts and behaviour are added then the truth-to-bullshit ratio could tilt favourably. Or not.

I didn’t do my homework so I went in not knowing what the film was making up, but I’ve since listened to a few podcasts so I can see how wild this stuff is — Napoleon never met Wellington, he wasn’t sighted by a sniper at Waterloo (rifles with telescopic sights were not a thing at the time), the Survivor’s Ball was not an actual event, not many people fell through the ice at Austerlitz, Napoleon didn’t witness the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, which didn’t happen in a small town square, and the former Emperor did not die saying “France… army… Josephine.”

Also, most of the main men are too old, sometimes decades too old (Phoenix, Rupert Everett, the mighty Ian MacNiece). So then the idea that Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) was older than Napoleon, which is both true and interesting, gets lost and we get something more conventional and what could have been a great role for a more established actor is squandered. Kirby is good, but has little to work with — Josephine, a rounded character, is reduced entirely to her relationship with Boney.

Phoenix does lots of weird, fun, actorly stuff, but never makes Napoleon credibly charismatic or impressive. When he flips the French army with a single speech, there seems no reason for their change of attitude (plus, the army is TINY — all the scenes this movie shares with Bondarchuk’s WATERLOO are inferior to the 1970 epic).

The dependable and magnetic Julian Rhind-Tutt is the most fun player, and is on screen for too short a time — again the long version is likely to be more satisfying. Next best is Everett, who plays Wellington as a rather precise copy of Reginald Owen — an amusing choice — with a splash of Edward Fox. So that’s very jolly, though it doesn’t fit in with what everyone else is doing. The film would be more fun if everyone were on Everett’s page.

The movie looks terrific — the battles are too small, though. Scott’s determination to do stuff for real seems to have hampered him, just as Nolan was straitjacketed by physical effects in DUNKIRK — the sense of the true epic scale is missing, despite the vast sums lavished on this picture.

I also regret the limited insights offered into Napoleon’s strategic brilliance. In the first battle, Toulon, much is made of the construction of mortars, and we see them being carried laboriously into action… and never see them used. Austerlitz feels more strategic, but the details are all wrong, the facts dumped in the trash so that Sir Ridley can reprise the battle on the ice in ALEXANDER NEVSKY, or the climax of Ken Russell’s BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN.

We do get to see stuff historical war movies haven’t been able to show, as when Phoenix’s horse is hit frontally by a cannon-blast. An equine chestburster. Never happened, of course, but I’ll forgive it.

“You think you’re so great because you have boats?” isn’t just a bad line, but it’s badly delivered — “so great” could have been played as “so mighty” but is played by Phoenix as “you’re not all that” — and he says it as if on the verge of tears, hardly the way the master strategian would have presented himself to an enemy… although apparently the British ambassador really did get under his skin. Still, if the film’s task is to make itself convincing even when counterfactual, this scene failed for me.

Scott’s recent interviews deserve their own takedown, because he has a full-throated, fat-headed fatuousness in his proclamations about this movie which shouldn’t be left unridiculed. But I enjoyed his big daft film.

NAPOLEON stars Arthur Fleck; The White Widow; Malik El Djebena; Oscar Wilde; Jock Horsfall; Tay Kolma; Tink; Dr. Macartney; Delia Surridge; John Houseman; Martin Boorman; Baron Vladimir Harkonnen; and Scissors Bentley.