Napoleon (2023)

7/10

If Ridley Scott has such contempt for history, he should probably stop making historical epics. The hit-or-miss director has turned his grumpy old man act up to 11 after historians criticized inaccuracies in his new film Napoleon, telling them to “get a life”. Hey Ridley, they have lives: they’re historians, and unlike yourself, historians try to determine the truth about what happened in the past. While writers and filmmakers are entitled to some artistic license in interpreting the past to make a good story, there’s a certain point at which deviation from the facts makes a work of art useless in shedding light on history. Scott has crossed that line before in films like his Christopher Columbus flick 1492: Conquest of Paradise. While nothing in Napoleon is quite as egregious as 1492, it does hurt the movie in helping us understand a major historical figure and his times.

I’ve come to believe that Ridley Scott’s best movies often succeed despite him more than because of him. True, Scott has always had a remarkable eye for visual spectacle. But as RedLetterMedia said in their Blade Runner review, Scott’s choices in the director’s cut suggest he doesn’t understand his own film. There’s a lot to love about Napoleon, but the director has only the most basic grasp on the historical significance of his subject.

I knew enough about the history to fill in the blanks. As expected, Scott offers plenty of visual spectacle, period costumes and weapons, and epic battle scenes. Of course, there’s a long history of filmmakers boasting about the accuracy of superficial elements like costumes, while missing the deeper meaning of historical periods they depict. The battle scenes in Napoleon are undeniably exciting, even if military historians have criticized them as inaccurate. During the Battle of Waterloo scene, I knew Scott wouldn’t be content with Napoleon standing at the rear of the battle giving orders. Instead, he shows Napoleon personally leading a cavalry charge—something the real Napoleon, who was trained as an artillery officer, never did. Nor did Napoleon fire on the Pyramids of Giza, a scene Scott tried to defend as “a fast way of saying he took Egypt.”

I was willing to forgive these kinds of inaccuracies, as well as non-military ones such as Napoleon being present for the execution of Marie Antoinette, in the name of poetic license. A bigger problem was the murky cinematography, which washes out all the colour. Why stage such epic battle scenes and make the picture so dark? On the other hand, I loved how Scott films major events in Napoleon’s life by drawing inspiration from famous paintings. The scene in which Napoleon crowns himself emperor, for example, is clearly based on Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1806 work The Coronation of Napoleon. These interior scenes are more brightly lit and therefore visually appealing; Scott should have taken the same approach with his exterior shots.

It’s hard to judge Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Napoleon, which Variety accurately described as “mumbly and oddly anti-charismatic”. Part of the problem is that we have less idea of what Napoleon’s personality was like than public figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, for whom audio and video recordings have preserved their particular ways of speaking. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a man who is awkward, lacking in charm and social graces, but effective on the battlefield, which is the real source of his power. Does this reflect the real Napoleon?

About the only thing historians seem to agree on about Napoleon’s personality was that he was highly ambitious. Alan Woods describes the young Napoleon as a “taciturn and moody lieutenant from a middle class family in Corsica”, qualities which Phoenix captures well (even if the movie passes over Napoleon’s Corsican background, another missed opportunity). Woods’s account of Napoleon’s coup on the 18th Brumaire is also reflected in the film. We see Napoleon trying to address the Directory before being cut off and chased out, saved only when his troops back him up—one of many scenes played to some degree for laughs, in which Napoleon is almost a cartoonish figure. But it’s not far off from Woods’s description:

Napoleon's conduct in the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire did not reflect much credit on him. It was hardly his greatest hour. In the moment of truth he cut a ridiculous figure as he tried to address the Convention and was interrupted and shouted down by his opponents. Personally brave and decisive on the battlefield, his nerve failed him in the field of debate. He was reduced to stammering a few commonplaces about the "God of Battles" in the midst of the jeers of the hostile deputies. At one point it looked as if the whole thing was going to be aborted by a handful of parliamentary rowdies, despite the fact that most of the deputies had already been bought and the army was in his pocket. In the end, he had to be rescued by his friends who dragged him out of the Chamber. Only the bayonets of his soldiers saved him from a shameful rout.

Napoleon is portrayed as something of a boor, who needs his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby) to teach him table manners. But Ellin Stein counters this portrayal, writing in Slate:

In actuality, Napoleon was not the loutish soldier Scott depicts; rather, he was from a family of minor Corsican aristocrats (Joséphine came from a similar family of minor nobles on Martinique), and so was not quite a rough diamond unacquainted with proper table manners. In fact, he was known for his love of literature—he curated a famous personal library—and Enlightenment thought.

Probably the biggest flaw of this film is its focus on the relationship between Napeleon and Joséphine—even as it tries to squeeze in the whole story of Napoleon’s rise and fall, from the Siege of Toulon in 1794 to his exile on the island of St. Helena and death in 1821. That’s asking a lot for a movie with a running time of 2 hours, 37 minutes. It’s simply not enough time to do justice to such an expansive narrative. Scott says that there’s a four-hour director’s cut out there, and I’m eager to see it because I think it’s probably a lot better. Such an epic story needs a truly epic length in order for everything to breathe.

Rather than trying to make a movie that devotes so much time to Napoleon and Joséphine’s relationship and includes lengthy battle scenes, a Napoleon movie at the length of this theatrical cut should have chosen to do one or the other. The romantic relationship could have made for an interesting film, but here it feels too often like a distraction from Scott’s real strength, which are the battle scenes.

Still, both Phoenix and Kirby are good at portraying the odd, toxic relationship between these two. Woods wrote about how Joséphine as much as Napoleon embodied the outlook of the French ruling class after the ebb of the revolution and rise of the Thermidorian reaction, which only wanted to to restore order and enjoy its newfound wealth and privileges:

[Napoleon] even got possession of Josephine Beauharnais, Barras' mistress (though it is more probable that she got possession of him). They were married in 1796. What Napoleon did not know was that she was one of Fouchés's spies. It was not too difficult to bribe such a woman, who was typical of the breed of aristocratic and semi-aristocratic courtesans and semi-courtesans who played a not insignificant role in Thermidor. This light-minded Creole lady wanted three hundred hats and seven hundred dresses a year and consequently always needed money. According to Fouché's memoirs, he paid her a thousand louis d'or to pay her bills and pass on everything her husband told her in the privacy of the marriage bed. This detail gives us a fairly accurate idea of the morality of the regime of Reaction.

Joséphine has some dialogue in which she alludes to her risqué past, but that’s about it. For the most part, the film focuses on romance and action rather than politics. I get why a Hollywood studio took this approach. Execs need to make a commercially successful movie. They think that audiences want romance, they want epic battle scenes, and don’t want lengthy focus on politics and history. But why make a movie about Napoleon and minimize its focus on politics? The entire reason we might care about his relationship with Joséphine at all is because of who this man was, his relationship to the French Revolution that allowed him to rise to the top of French society, and the role of his own ambition in the Napoleonic Wars.

My favourite movie about the French Revolution is the 1989 film La Révolution française, often acclaimed as the most historically accurate film on the revolution. It’s a lot better than Scott’s Napoleon, and unlike Scott, the filmmakers consulted extensively with historians. La Révolution française is six hours long and divided into two parts. That’s the kind of length you need for a film about such a complex period. Historians have pointed out that Napoleon ignores many of most consequential non-military deeds from Napoleon’s rule, such as his establishment of the Bank of France, the Napoleonic Code, or his concordat with the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps these are mentioned in the director’s cut. But their absence here flows from the central problem that Napoleon fails to adequately explain the motivations of its title character, or the history he helped make.

Woods again:

Great individuals, as Hegel explains, are those who express the nature of their historical period better and more consistently than anyone else. To use his exact phrase, they embody the "World Spirit". When Hegel saw Napoleon he is said to have exclaimed "I have just seen the World Spirit riding on a horse!" Napoleon certainly expressed the nature of his times better than most. His "luck" can be reduced to the fact that he rose with the Revolution and then went on to embody the spirit of Thermidorean reaction more clearly and consistently than anyone else.

There’s so much more that could be said about the Napoleonic era. In a way, any review of this movie that grapples with its historical accuracy faces the same challenge Scott did. The life and times of Napoleon are just such a rich, complex subject that it’s hard to do it justice in a brief overview. Consider the 1927 French silent epic Napoléon, often considered the best film about Bonaparte. Written and directed by Abel Gance, that film is 5 hours, 30 minutes long (other cuts exist with different lengths). Yet even at that length, the Gance picture “only” covers the period from Napoleon’s schoolboy days in 1783 to his invasion of Italy in 1796, and was meant to be just the first in a series of six films.

For what it is, I enjoyed Scott’s Napoleon even if its appeal is largely at the surface level. I liked the performances, action, costumes, sets, and spectacle, and its dramatization of one of the most significant eras and individuals in history. The movie even offers a surprising dose of humour, a welcome respite from its weightier aspects. Still, the film gives us little deeper insight into what drove Napoleon, offering only the most bare-bones explanations for why the wars that justified all Scott’s glorious battle scenes were fought in the first place. I look forward to the director’s cut.