While Hollywood certainly has it’s fair share of work horses, surely one of the most impressive work ethics toiling today belongs to Ridley Scott, the visionary eye behind Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator. At an impressive 85 years old, he’s managed to craft 28 cinematic features, countless TV ads and music videos and produced more content that I could hope to count. What’s even more impressive is that despite the director being in his “winter years”, his three last directorial efforts were released over a mere three year period.
To sum up my gushing, Scott managed to release three, star-studded epics that were all, about completely different subjects in his eighties while I struggle to get out of bed while in my damn forties – the dude is a machine. However, while his newest opus concerns a historical figure with a similar, unstoppable drive, Napoleon, it might be time for Scott to maybe take his foot off the gas a little.
The year is 1793 and as Marie Antoinette takes her fateful trip to the gallows during the French Revolution, a young army officer known as Napoleon Bonaparte looks on, unaware that he, himself is about to step onto the world stage in bombastic fashion. A few short months later his bold tactics helps break the Siege of Toulon as he leads an assault that repels the British ships with pounding artillery fire and a couple of years after that, Napoleon also successfully manages to suppress the royalist insurrection on 13 Vendémiare in 1795.
Simply put, his decisive use of artillery means that the guy is going places and as he advances up through the ranks of French politics he meets and courts aristocratic widow Joséphine de Beauharnais and the two soon marry. However, despite their relationship being both tempestuous and toxic as a stream in Chernobyl, their frequent and vigorous bouts of sex fail to produce a single child – something that seems to amuse the French press to no end. However, after hearing a rumour that Joséphine is having a dalliance with another man, an incensed Napoleon takes time out from shooting cannonballs at Egyptian national monuments during the Battle Of The Pyramids in 1798 to sail back home and get his house in order and as a result, turns his “desertion” into yet another victory when he overthrows the French leaders in a coup and becomes one of the teio that makes up the First Consul.
From there, the sky is the limit as he is eventually crowned the Emperor of the French by the Pope, but all of his advancements on both the battlefield and in politics can’t protect him from the issue of his wife not being able to bear him an heir and the strain it pits on their already complex relationship.
While Scott’s level of output can’t be faulted (we’ve still got Gladiator 2 to come in 2024), it maybe would be advisable that the director should think about slowing his roll a little, because while Napoleon contains all the visual flair and scope you’d expect from the man who casually mounts enormous battle scenes with the ease that some people butter toast, this telling of the legendary, historical figure suffers somewhat from being more a greatest hits package than an in-depth affair.
It’s not that Napoleon is a dull movie, in fact, at regular intervals it’s fiendishly funny, genuinely exhilarating and casts a refreshingly modern eye over the complicated central relationship between Bonaparte and de Beauharnais. However, while trying to rope together all this factors, Scott seems to lose some much needed cohesion that’s a common pitfall for factual historical epics that try to do too much.
Of the things that the movie does get right (and from what I hear, historical accuracy isn’t one of them), by far the most interesting aspect of the movie is the central connection between the two leads which seem to be trying to channel the co-dependant toxicity of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. As Napoleon and Joséphine’s pairing involve petty spats, cheating, narcissistic mind games and furious rutting, their constant, needy letters to each other are an amusing contrast to her blank, impassive face as her husband furiously takes her from behind. There’s a sense that this comical, passive aggressiveness may have appeared during filming and all parties would have like to explore it further, but the ruthless demands of the biopic simply insists that it gets shifted aside periodically to make way for other threads.
One of those other threads turns out to be a deeply cynical look at politics as the fallout of the French Revolution allows to Scott to lightly satirize matters and tread lightly in the realms of Armando Iannucci’s Death Of Starlin or any period-set Terry Gilliam movie that had blustering figures of history running around in a panic. In fact, the tone of the politics seems to hint at what Scott is trying to strive for as his sarcastic, almost farcically deadpan, telling of events wants to show how ludicrous it is that the deaths 3 million people in numerous wars hinged on a man who was a horribly flawed as you or I. While you’d think that the merging of zig-zagging politics and passive-aggressive romance would click together quite well, Scott realises that he’d better stuff some truly stunning battle sequences in there too which, while tremendously rousing, feel like they should be an a far more serious movie than Scott seems to be making. From the opening battle, which sees a cannonball spectacularly plough into Napoleon’s horse while he’s riding it, to a bravura sequence involving the French luring Austrians onto an iced over lake before shattering it with yet more cannon fire (loved his cannons, did Napoleon), cinema’s elder statesman seems to relish proving that he can still drop la bombe when he wants to, but none of his individual threads seem to want to gel to make one, glorious whole.
While Scott’s approach may be more alienating that enlightening, both Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby seem to have bought into it entirely with the former attacking his role with a sense of uncertainty masked by an unhealthy dose of detached egotism (watch him gloss over his loses to a roomful of enthralled children). However, the latter meets him with every blow, seemingly horribly manipulative, yet genuinely loving at every turn. Whether any of the personal stuff that transpires in the movie actually happened as presented is about as unlikely as Napoleon choosing to wear a normal sized hat, but it’s obvious that Ridley Scott couldn’t give two shits as he climbs atop a metaphorical steed and charges headlong into a film that tactically skews both goofy and impressive at regular intervals.
Napoleon doesn’t quite meet its Waterloo, despite boasting a tone as inconsistent as the central romance, but taken in small doses it modestly conquers the notion that one of history’s greatest military minds was both a tyranical tactician and a distracted cuckold.
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