Napoleon

Director: Ridley Scott (UK. USA). Year of Release: 2023

Paris, 1789. We start with lengthy opening titles containing text cribbed from French Revolution for Dummies. Once they’re done, we’re in 1793. An army captain looking suspiciously like Joachim Phoenix stands in the crowd watching the execution of Marie Antoinette. After a bit of toing and froing getting the ex-queen’s head into the guillotine, the blade smashes down, and the executioner holds high a head which looks just as prosthetic as the one we see in a puppet show shortly after.

Moving swiftly on to captain Napoleon explaining to his supervisors how they can force out the British troops who are laying siege to the port of Toulon. The Brits are entirely dependent on their navy (in another scene, Napoleon risibly yells at a British opponent “You think you’re so great because you have BOATS!”) The British navy is equally dependent on the fort overlooking the city, so all the French army needs to do is take the fort.

Cut to: British squaddies shouting down disdainfully at the goat herders passing by the fort. Napoleon leads a night time attack, and when a cannon ball takes down his horse, he carries on on foot. As he climbs one of the ladders used to storm the fort, he puffs and wheezes, like he’s experiencing one of the panic attacks suffered by Beau Wassermann in Beau is Afraid. Nonetheless, the French army is victorious and the Brits are kicked out of Toulon.

Pretty soon it’s 12 years later, and Napoleon is routing the combined Russian and Austrian forces at Austerlitz. While Napoleon has a US-American accent, and most of the French characters speak plummy English, the leaders of both Russia and Austria have a vague Mitteleuropäisches voice to show that they are foreign. Austerlitz is the film’s most impressive scene by far, especially when French cannons break the ice beneath their opponents’ bloody troops, causing them to drown.

After this, it’s diminishing returns, at least where the battle scenes are concerned. By the time we get to Waterloo – where Rupert Everett plays the Duke of Wellington with such a posh English accent that you wonder whether he’s not secretly French – you realise how difficult it must be to make a historical drama now. We are just so used to endless scenes of men in period uniforms charging at each other, that it’s virtually impossible to show us something we haven’t seen already.

While all this is going on, Napoleon is wooing Josephine, an aristo whose late husband fought with the king. They first meet at a fancy ball, but Napoleon is too subdued to make articulate conversation. Josephine makes fun of him, asking why he’s wearing a stupid costume. He proudly announces that this is his military uniform and that he has just led the charge to free Toulon. She doesn’t look impressed, and he says little after that.

Nonetheless, Napoleon persists. When Josephine’s cute son asks for his father’s sword, Napoleon breaks rules to give him the weapon. Well, he gives him a sword – as the names of their owners was not recorded, he has no idea whether it is the right one. It’s not long before Napoleon and Josephine are having clumsy sex, and he is writing long whiny letters from the front saying how much he loves her and asking why she never writes back.

Not all as peachy in Eden, though. Napoleon finds out that Josephine has taken a lover (as has he, but droit de signeuer and all that) and rushes immediately back from the Egyptian front. More worryingly, it seems that Josephine is no longer able to have kids – a theory which Napoleon tests by getting an 18-year old girl pregnant. This means that she can’t bear him a male heir (the only type which counts). So he divorces here and marries an Austrian princess who we never see again.

Napoleon, the film, is as much about Napoleon’s affairs with Josephine (which continue after the divorce) than it is about his military prowess. So it’s a shame that too many scenes remind us that director Ridley Scott was responsible for the execrable House of Gucci. Very early on, Josephine hoicks up her dress, points between her legs and says something suggestive. Is this supposed to be funny? Seductive? Whatever it’s supposed to be, the scene is highly embarrassing.

Despite all this, Napoleon is not a bad film, well it’s not terrible. To pick up a previous theme, it is no House of Gucci. Both Joachim Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine play their parts in a way that supercedes the mediocre script. Phoenix’s Napoleon, in particular, is a pitiful character – a combination of hie recent roles of the aforementioned Beau Wassermann and Arthur Fleck in Joker. This is Napoleon as Amadeus, a man who rose above his social capabilitie.

The problem is that it’s unlikely that this Napoleon would have conquered most of Europe. Perhaps the film is making a sly dig at the Great Man theory of history. Maybe it is saying that what is important is not who’s in charge but who’s doing all the work. Maybe, but the rest of the film says otherwise. We concentrate almost entirely on the title character. Even than, we only know that Napoleon is great because people say he’s great. Post-Toulon we see no evidence for this.

Then again, this is not a film that pays much attention to what actually happened in history. When Ridley Scott was challenged on this his answer was “you weren’t there”. Well no, Ridley, but the film has ample evidence to show that you weren’t there either. It’s a trivial example, but when, in 1812, we hear that Napoleon led the combined armies of several European countries, two of the countries named – Germany and Italy – were not even created until later that century.

Does any of this matter? Well, yes and no. Shakespeare’s Histories are great despite their loose relationship to historical fact. But Napoleon was not written by Shakespeare, that much is pretty clear. Instead of marginal things like character and plot development, we see just too many scenes of palace interiors, ballrooms and the nouveaux riches at play. The film lasts over 2½ hours, but has very little to say. Apparently there’s a 4 hour version out there, God help us.