Many great filmmakers have tried to tackle the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, yet have been thwarted, just as the little Corsican was when he invaded Russia, by the vastness of the enterprise.
Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick were both defeated, and in a way Sir Ridley Scott is, too.
There is much about his latest epic that is enjoyable. Some of the battle scenes are truly spectacular and Vanessa Kirby is astutely cast as the beguiling Josephine, who is the second great love of Napoleon’s life – after himself.
However, Joaquin Phoenix in the title role gives an enigmatic, mumbling performance that leaves you wondering, even after two and a half hours, just what makes Napoleon tick. We get that he’s a military genius. We get why he is crowned emperor.
Many great filmmakers have tried to tackle the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, yet have been thwarted, just as the little Corsican was when he invaded Russia
Pictured: Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby starring in Napoleon
And we get, from scenes of weird psychosexual intensity, that he’s captivated by his alluringly sexy, decidedly naughty wife.
But beyond all that he seems like a peculiarly empty vessel for David Scarpa’s uneven script, which puts a few lines in his mouth that made yesterday’s audience laugh out loud.
‘You think you’re so great because you have boats,’ he snaps at an envoy from England. Petulant children have been sent to the naughty step for less.
As parents of small children also know, you have to pick your battles. Scott picks his with due care. Napoleon masterminded more than 60 victories but the most defining of his battles, certainly on this side of the Channel (where we conspicuously have no railway stations called Austerlitz), are those he lost.
His most crippling defeats came during his disastrous Russian campaign and above all in 1815 at Waterloo, which gets the full blood-and-thunder treatment in this film, with Rupert Everett as a splendidly imperious Duke of Wellington.
The narrative begins in the aftermath of the French Revolution, with Napoleon, still an anonymous young soldier, in the crowd watching the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette. Soon afterwards he shows his tactical nous and personal bravery by routing the English at the Siege of Toulon.
There is much about his latest epic that is enjoyable. Some of the battle scenes are truly spectacular and Vanessa Kirby is astutely cast as the beguiling Josephine, who is the second great love of Napoleon’s life – after himself
The narrative begins in the aftermath of the French Revolution, with Napoleon, still an anonymous young soldier, in the crowd watching the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette
I don’t know how accurate it is that the English troops were well and truly sozzled at the time of that attack but it rings uncomfortably true.
Plenty of other moments, by contrast, do not. I expect some academics will stick a firm Wellington boot into this film, doubtless goaded by Scott’s comment: ‘When I have issues with historians I ask ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well shut the **** up then’.’
That’s all very well, but an English officer finding Napoleon in his sights at Waterloo is another laugh-out-loud moment, given that the French are about a quarter of a mile away and the long-range sniper rifle, so far as I’m aware, has yet to be invented.
Still, cinematic epics and historical exactitude have rarely been on more than vague nodding terms.
And Scott’s film does at least explain Napoleon’s passion for Josephine, even if it doesn’t seem to be fired by anything more than uncontrollable lust. This is further inflamed when he learns, while on one of his distant campaigns, that she’s taken a lover.
Indeed, she is still able to torment him from afar even after he has the marriage annulled because of her failure to bear him an heir, carrying on with the Tsar of Russia, no less.
But can it truly be the case that a newspaper reported her promiscuity with the headline ‘Boney’s Old Bird Caught Out of the Nest Again’? If that’s dramatic licence, it should be immediately revoked.
This movie is gaining more than an hour of material when it moves to the small screen, so perhaps that will help us better grasp the complexities of Napoleon’s character. But as epics go, Scott and Phoenix teamed up to much greater effect in the wonderful Gladiator, 23 years ago.
For me, though it is marginal, this one gets a thumbs down.
Napoleon opens in cinemas on November 22 and shows later on Apple TV+
