Director Ridley Scott’s 28th feature film, Napoleon, is actually two movies at once. Battlefield scenes of intense violence and gore trade places with drawing room moments of verbal jousting and whispers. This bifurcation reflects the tension between the protagonist and his wife, but it also seems to indicate ambivalence on the part of the filmmakers. The edits are abrupt and the story leaps forward with little exposition and only Napoleon’s hunched stride and scowling face to draw a through-line. A rumored four-hour director’s cut that will stream at some point on Apple TV+ might fill in some of what feels like missing pieces of the puzzle in this ambitious, transporting and sometimes frustrating film.
Starting off with Marie Antoinette meeting her fate at the guillotine, David Scarpa’s script first presents the army captain Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) witnessing the execution in the aftermath of the French Revolution, looking more unsettled than bloodthirsty. Not yet a powerful man himself, he clearly gets the message about the fickleness and danger of popular opinion. His ambitions, as demonstrated in the first harrowing battle sequence at Toulon, seem to involve defeating whomever is in front of him at the moment; any grander design goes unspoken. This is a pattern that successfully repeats‒in love and in war‒until his ambitions get the best of him during his disastrous march into Russia.
In fact, Napoleon and its protagonist share a similar shortcoming: a sense of blindly plunging into the next battle without an inkling of a larger strategy or overarching goal. What is he after, aside from stacking up victories and honorifics? We see him go from army captain to general to First Consul to Emperor of France with little sense of the connective tissue between these advances. This creates a sense of momentum which serves the film’s pacing but comes at the cost of context and creates the impression that Napoleon’s upward mobility was purely a product of his own will. Political machinations take place in fragmentary scenes that hint at depth while remaining shallow. The counterpoint to this steady plunge toward absolute power is Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), a widowed aristocrat who marries the upwardly mobile dictator-to-be and represents the one goal he can’t fully attain.
The love letters between Napoleon and Josephine are legendary for their romantic passion. The film offers glimpses of that, although the central contradiction‒his powerlessness to stop her from openly having affairs‒is never fully explored. In the drawing room segments of the film, Josephine is the one with the real power, reducing Napoleon at times to stammering and tears. Kirby’s performance is mesmerizing, a refraction of Phoenix’s understated gravity. It’s the chemistry between these two that keeps the tension buzzing throughout. Once she’s out of the picture, both the protagonist and the film lose some of their sense of purpose.
When it comes to the textures, sights and sounds of Napoleon’s world, Scott delivers on his reputation for sensuous cinematography and set design. Dust and pollen swirl in the air, insects buzz and sunbeams plunge into rooms like peripheral characters. A monumental set piece reenacts Napoleon’s auto-coronation in Notre Dame, faithfully capturing the scale and detail from the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David (who is depicted sketching among the crowd in their finery). The battle scenes are as visceral as those of Scott’s 2000 Oscar winner Gladiator, while the interior set pieces leave the impression that you could feel the threads on the characters’ clothes. And the hats! Napoleon apparently never put anything on his head that wasn’t as wide as a doorway.
The surprising thing about Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is that he’s rather muted. He speaks plainly, throws few tantrums (aside from one memorable food fight) and for the most part behaves like a guy with an average haircut working in the next cubicle over. There’s an anti-charisma about him, although he’s shown to effortlessly command the respect and loyalty of soldiers, aristocrats and common folk. Was he an empty vessel into which people put whatever they needed from a leader? Emerging from the guillotine-crazed aftermath of the French Revolution, where an entire generation of leaders was separated from their heads, he found himself at just the right time and place to step into a void that needed a strongman. But whether he was driven by anything other than gluttony for power is a question Napoleon leaves unanswered.
Photo courtesy of Apple Original Films / Columbia Pictures
The post Napoleon appeared first on Spectrum Culture.