Veteran director Ridley Scott unleashes his own Napoleon complex in this uneven but never less than thrilling account of the French military leader and dictator. It's big, very big, on battles but might leave you shortchanged if you’re looking to understand why a relatively lowly Corsican artillery corporal wanted to take over the world and why he remains one of the most polarising figures in history.
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It is sweeping stuff with David Scarpa’s witty and spiky script galloping through the years - and the two-and-half-hour running time - like a charger at Waterloo. However, Scott, who made his directorial debut in 1977 with The Duellists, a very fine movie also set during the Napoleonic wars, is more concerned with the bang and whizz and not the why and how of his commanding central figure.
Reuniting with the 85-year-old director for the first time since Gladiator, 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix may be old for the role (Napoleon was only 24 when he gave the Brits a very rude awakening in Toulon in 1793 and a mere 35 when he famously crowned himself Emperor of France in Notre-Dame in 1804) but Phoenix’s lined but still boyish face is a study in vainglory, hubris and fear. He glowers under his iconic bicorn hat and simpers like a scolded puppy around Joséphine de Beauharnais.
And it’s his amour fou with Joséphine that the whole movie hinges on. Vanessa Kirby is flinty and shrewd in the role but it is hard not to see her as a cipher. Scarpa’s creaky central thesis seems to be that Boney’s failure in the sack drives him ever on in his conquest of Europe. Cuckolded at home, the poor lad pours his humiliation into a dedication to universal suffering and destruction, all for the glory of France.
We’ve already seen Ian Holm as a hilariously diminutive Nappy in The Time Bandits ("Five foot one and conqueror of Italy, not bad, huh?") and Scott doesn’t duck the preposterousness of the man as well as the terror and destruction he unleashed on Europe. You could see Monty Python or Mel Brooks looking on approvingly as Napoleon bumbles and blusters his way through dealings with the increasingly despotic Directory back in Paris and the sheer terror on his face that even his rampant ego can’t mask on the battlefield. There are titters to be had in how Scott handles the love scenes, like something from the 1970 historical romp Don’t Start The Revolution Without Me or maybe even Woody Allen’s Tolstoy send-up Love and Death.
Those peevish tantrums also gives us one of the movie’s best lines when an exasperated Napoleon barks at an English naval commander, "You think you are so great because you have boats!", only to see his all-conquering Grand Army brought to its knees by the Russian winter.
Napoleon regarded Europe as a giant chessboard and there are a total of six battle set-pieces, from the marvellous opening sequence at the port of Toulon in 1793 where the 24-year-old little corporal made his name, to Marengo, to his death wish gamble in Russia in 1812. However, it’s the icy hell scape of the battle of Austerlitz that is the most memorable. It’s a strategic triumph all of its own, echoing the kind of attention to detail and grand vistas of Kubrick.
Waterloo, already the subject of a very good movie of the same name starring a very well-cast Rod Stieger as Nappy in 1970, is given a huge chunk of screen time and it’s a vast panorama of mud and smoke as Napoleon makes his last stand against the Duke of Wellington, played with foppish arrogance by Rupert Everett. Scott is in his element in a brilliantly marshalled sequence of chargers, flashing bayonets and cannonball ripping flesh and shattering bone.
The gloriously combative Scott has as usual come out swinging when faced with criticism about his film’s historical liberties. In Scarpa’s reading, Napoleon witnessed the execution of Marie Antoinette and we also see him blasting smithereens from the top of the pyramids of Giza.
Phoenix portrayal of the great dictator as an emotionally stunted man-child in the mould of Musk and Trump is too one-note but any accusations that Scott has humanised Napoleon are banished when the multi-million death toll of his territorial blood lust appears on screen before the final credit roll.
Scott, a great man for the exhaustive director’s cut, says there is a four-and-a-half-hour version of Napoleon to be aired on Apple TV later this year and perhaps all that missing biographical meat will be fleshed out there. After all, Abel Glance’s 1927 silent epic took a full five hours and only got as far as the invasion of Italy.
The single-minded Scott has already proven his chops as a master of historical drama but his Napoleon is a very well-mounted epic that loses its leading man in the fog of war. In the end, you might say Scott has given us the small man theory of history.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
