Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: Bad history, worse film
Nicholas M. Gallagher
Defending his Napoleon from grumbles caused by early rumors of historical inaccuracy, director Ridley Scott snapped that “when I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.’” Scott had a point, or so it seemed. This is the man who made a movie about a gladiator whose death in the arena restores the Roman Republic. And in the words of Aristotle, “σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν” — “it slapped” (loosely translated). Not only is it always right first and foremost to judge a work of art on its own terms, but also Scott in particular has earned the benefit of the doubt many times over. So I set out to watch Napoleon not to carp about whether he had really fired cannon at the Pyramids during his invasion of Egypt but to see if it was good.
I regret to report it is not good. It is bad. It is bad bad.
IF ONLY THE KILLER WERE SILENT
Napoleon is really two movies in one. One could be called Napoleon and Josephine, a practically art-house piece focusing on Napoleon’s relationship with his first wife. The second Napoleon is a standard biopic. Trying to cram both into a two-hour, thirty-eight-minute runtime would be a high order for any director, especially as the biopic needs to cover, at least to some degree, the key events of European history from 1793-1815. But both projects are also deeply flawed, in interrelated ways.
To start with the romantic part: The relationship between Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine combines a Top Gun I level of sexual chemistry with a hold-me-like-you-did-by-the-lake-on-Naboo level of script writing. Their exchanges are at times physically painful to sit through.
There is a point to all this — the script writers had not, as I fleetingly thought, never known sexual attraction to another human being. Rather, the film is designed to depict Napoleon as a psychological case (due, it is implied, to the Freudian machinations of his mother) who quickly becomes subservient to Josephine, the object of a desire he can neither fully comprehend nor control. She in turn becomes codependent on him, and somehow—we are not ever told how—the resulting alchemy leads to world conquest.
But this raises more difficulties than it resolves. By far the biggest is that it never explains why Josephine is attracted to Napoleon. (As for the other way around, well: he sees her at a ball, he gawps at her, q.e.d.) To be sure, a transactional motive is suggested at first, when Josephine is just out of the prison in which she endured the Terror when she catches the eye of the rising-star general. But for two and a half decades after? For answers to this and other riddles, we must look to the biopic part of the movie.
When it comes to telling the story of Napoleon Bonaparte, Scott’s repeated, dismissive assertions of artistic license — “I left reading the books to the poor bastard who had to write the screenplay” — start to ring a bit hollower. A biopic is, after all, itself a recognized genre of Hollywood film, and it comes with its own set of expectations.
Oppenheimer, to take a successful recent example that kept recurring to me, spent a great deal of time lavishly trying to get the audience to understand the intricacies of nuclear physics. Napoleon, by contrast, never once attempts a sustained explanation of Napoleon’s strategic or tactical gifts, something much easier to show on film. This is particularly odd given that Napoleonic warfare took place during a period when battle tactics were like chess, with each side knowing the moves the other’s pieces could make, be they artillery, infantry, or cavalry. (Historians will say this is a cliched oversimplification, but then again, simplifying was Scott’s job.) This is compounded by the film’s habit of reducing the few battles it does depict to “one neat trick.” if we just break the ice on which the enemy is standing, for example, or use heated shot against ships, we’ll win. That sort of technologically inflected trickery is pretty much the opposite of Napoleon’s sustained tactical mastery. As for strategy or logistics, forget about it.
Meanwhile, statesmanship and statecraft — accomplishments like overseeing the codification of the Code Napoleon, spreading his version of the Enlightenment across Europe, or reorganizing thousand-year-old kingdoms — simply do not appear. Without these achievements, moreover, Napoleon’s downfall — the diplomatic and strategic misjudgments that led to the Russian catastrophe, or the tactical mistakes at Waterloo — go from tragic missteps or (depending on who you asked) the inevitable fate of a tyrant to a matter of random happenstance.
In short, Napoleon just isn’t very interested in either military strategy or politics. That’s very weird! And it also points to the main hole in the Napoleon-Josephine relationship arc. Theirs was a relationship founded from the first on the attractions of power: her sexual power, the power bestowed on him by his battlefield gifts, and ultimately the political power that grew out of it. Without an adult understanding of power, no wonder the film comes off as various types of sophomoric. Whether it is the power of the gender-studies undergrad variety or the explosive cannonball type is almost besides the point.
Many of Napoleon’s other problems stem from its lack of a sense of time and timing. Here, I think the casting of the 49-year-old Phoenix to play Napoleon, who was 23 when Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine and 45 at Waterloo, was a serious mistake. Phoenix has one of the most fascinating faces in show business, one that displays great depths of emotion, but generally emotion in the direction of pain, world-weariness, and cynicism. So when we meet Napoleon, he appears not a hyper-gifted upstart on the verge of a meteoric rise, but aged, passed-over, and bitter. Forget charming the pants off Josephine, it seems inconceivable that he could inspire soldiers to follow him into battle. Why, in a revolutionary situation, do they? It’s hard to shake the bizarre sense that it’s only because they know on some level that he’s Napoleon, and the script says he wins.
Because Phoenix looks the same throughout the film, there’s no visual sense of the passage of time, even as the whirlwind pace of events makes the timing of the plot hard to follow. And because he’s been written as a taciturn psychological case, there’s not much sense of character development either. Even the disintegration of his marriage with Josephine, the emotional pivot of the movie, is reduced to a mysterious failure to conceive, in the vein of Henry VIII, rather than the consequence of Josephine being six years older than Napoleon — a fact he was well aware of when he married her and highly conscious of during the painful divorce.
The net result of Napoleon is to make history less interesting, less comprehensible, less sexy, even at times less violent than it actually was. Quite the feat for Hollywood. And it’s impossible to escape the instinct that this outcome reflects the spirit of our time, not his: The virtually unimaginable concept of young political leaders, the uninterest of our elite in military matters, an allergy to greatness. Historians and artists before have painted Napoleon as a great hero or a great villain; Scott may be the first to paint him as an idiot savant. “I am a brute,” Napoleon is forced to say during a sadomasochistic exchange with Josephine. And, history be damned, this movie wants that to be true.
In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond famously said “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Desmond is, of course, delusional. But Napoleon Bonaparte was a figure such that madmen for a century found themselves in asylums claiming to be him. He was big. It’s Ridley Scott’s film that is small.
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Nicholas M. Gallagher is a lawyer and culture writer.