“I was having a succulent breakfast.”
The speaker is one of the Directory, the committee that
ruled France in the years after the Reign of Terror, who finds himself
inconvenienced by an early morning coup d’etat. It’s a line worthy of Monty
Python and, coming somewhere around the half-hour mark, reveals the silly soul
of Napoleon. If there’s any chance Ridley Scott’s film will be a serious
Great Man biopic, this gleefully dashes it. Scott is determinedly, completely
unserious.
It’s not that Scott isn’t trying to make the best film he
can. He just isn’t interested in making a certain kind of epic: rousing,
edifying, Oscar-winning. Maybe he’ll return to these—Gladiator 2 is in
the works. But the last three films he's made dare you to take them seriously. The
Last Duel (2021) is memorable not for its Rashomon games but the
Chaucerian ribaldry Ben Affleck gets up to. House of Gucci (2021) is
comic opera pretending to be tragic opera, half a dozen different Italian
accents tossed in a blender and served on ham.
Napoleon ups the scale, but is nevertheless
(intentionally) a farce. It begins with the future emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) a
lowly army captain. Ambitious, gifted and impatient, he rises up the ranks as
France passes from monarchy to Robespierre to the Directory. His great
love—France—acquires a rival when he locks eyes with the widow of one of the
victims of the Revolution. He falls so completely for Josephine (Vanessa Kirby)
he doesn’t care that she’s flirting with an old friend at their wedding dinner,
or failing to reply to feverish missives sent while conquering Egypt.
It's the slyest of ideas to make Napoleon and Josephine’s
convoluted sex life and marriage the backdrop to his relentless militarism.
When he finds out about an affair she's having, he immediately leaves Egypt for
France. Too late: her dalliance is front page news. He throws her out, takes
her back in almost immediately. When he becomes emperor, it’s an aphrodisiac so
heady that he can’t even form sentences; he just turns up in her dressing room
and hums hornily. There’s also the growing problem of the lack of an heir, a
situation in which everyone from Napoleon’s advisors to his formidable mother
are involved.
Phoenix, brilliantly and unexpectedly, plays the man as an
occasional genius and a consistent dolt (“Destiny has brought me this lamb
chop” is his wittiest salvo). This is a far cry from Abel Gance’s Napoleon in
the 1927 silent film, leading the crowd in the first singing of the
Marseillaise. Instead, you get a petulant man-child asking the British
emissary: “You think you’re so great just because you have boats?” Napoleon has
an instinctive feel for warfare; as he himself says, he just knows where
to place a cannon. He’s awkward and brusque in all his other dealings, which
sometimes serves him well (he brushes past niceties that would’ve held others
back) but also means that Josephine ends up his only friend, even after they’re
divorced. Their bond is surprising and touching, born out of self-preservation
(on her part) and lusty fascination (on his) but growing to include concern and
tenderness. Kirby is terrific as the acidic, intelligent queen, playing Hepburn
to Pheonix’s stolid Tracy.
Scott runs through Napoleon’s biggest hits: Toulon, Egypt,
Moscow. Austerlitz is the centrepiece, an extended battle in the snow, Napoleon
systematically outthinking the Austro-Russian army. It’s as stunning as
anything in Gladiator (2000), but Scott has changed as a filmmaker: he
has little use for heroes now. Pheonix’s Napoleon is a cold fish—his victories
are cerebral but uninvolving. The Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) is even
colder, turning Waterloo into a hilarious sodden chess game of military
strategy and lack of charisma.
One of the famous unmade films is Stanley Kubrick’s
‘Napoleon’, which he planned for years but couldn’t get off the ground. It’s
weirdly fitting that Scott’s Napoleon has much in common with a period
film Kubrick did make: Barry Lyndon (1975). Both films are mocking,
ironic, unimpressed by the petty politics of late 18th and early 19th century
European high society. Though his playing field is much smaller, Barry is not
dissimilar to Napoleon, a resourceful dullard of (relatively) modest birth who
stumbles through high society. But there’s a crucial difference. A tension
exists in Kubrick’s film, between the compositions like oil paintings, the
perfectly chosen costumes and mansions and classical pieces, and the dull
advance of its protagonist. In Scott's film, there's no pathos or incidental
beauty. The joke is always on Napoleon. This makes it more fun, and also more
disposable.
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