Sunday Morning! “Napoleon” by Ridley Scott

The breaking of so great a thing should leave a bigger crack.

The Napoleon that never was

It’s a wonder it took so long to make a new movie about Napoleon Bonaparte. Following the success of 2001, Stanley Kubrick planned a film about the Corsican military leader who became the first Emperor of France, but it never came to fruition and remains one of the most famous unfinished films of all time. A key issue was cost- Kubrick intended to use about 40,000 extras and rival Sergei Bondarchuk’s great War and Peace adaptation, but the Soviets had a slight advantage in terms of cheap labor, and so the Napoleon Gap remained. The dream never died, though, and Steven Spielberg has been working, for the last ten years, on a limited series based on Kubrick’s Napoleon, now that filmmakers can use as many digital extras, and seemingly as much money, as they wish.

Aside from Bill and Ted, the last major film to feature Napoleon, and what really sunk Kubrick’s film, was Bondarchuk’s 1970 English-language film Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as the Emperor and featuring some fairly amazing battle scenes. Its record-setting use of 15,000 extras still stands today, but the film was… a bit of a Waterloo for producer Dino De Laurentiis. It failed to recoup its costs, although it was a big inspiration for a young Peter Jackson. Now, okay, let’s be honest: Have you seen it? Me neither.

Clearly, however, battle scenes are the heart of any Napoleon film, and one wonders how audiences will receive Ridley Scott’s Napoleon when it releases this week. Are we burnt out on warfare at the moment? How much excitement can we be expected to muster for military glory? And, really, how should we feel about egomaniacal political tyrants?

The actual Napoleon Bonaparte was remembered as a sort of hypomanic control freak who attempted to conquer all of Europe, West and East, launched Europe’s Orientalist adventure with his ill-fated (and somewhat bizarre) invasion of Egypt, solidified the gains of the Revolution with his legal code, and probably saved France, but only by putting it on a permanent military economy that drained its coffers. In other words, he’s not the most sympathetic character.

Yet, as a novelist once told me, your job is not to worry about whether your characters are “sympathetic” or “unsympathetic,” but ask yourself, are they compelling? For the Romantics, Napoleon was the archetypical obsessive brilliant… well, Romantic, and hence extremely fascinating. For generations of historians, he was the archetypical “great man” that drives history, a claim that actually has some validity in this particular case, although contemporary historians are much more critical of great men than they used to be. Great men tend to do great damage.

And now, in the hands of director Scott and actor Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon is… a bit of a sad sack. “Emo Napo” I’ve taken to calling him. I caught a press screening of the film for an outlet that, quite reasonably, decided my take on the film was too close to their review, so I think it’s probably okay to let you know my thoughts here. Remember that I did my Ph.D. in French History and might well be the target audience for this movie.

Basically, it was always going to come down to the battle scenes. Napoleon was primarily a military genius who tried to apply his skillset to statecraft with mixed results. He took part in somewhere between 60 and 80 battles and created much of his “military strategy” on the fly, winning more battles than he lost- until he didn’t. He spent his career as a shark that needed to keep moving.

The film only covers a handful of these battles, but it does so incredibly well. The Battle of Austerlitz is an absolute jaw-dropper in Napoleon, and basically demands to be seen on the big screen. Credit must go to cinematographer Darius Wolski and Scott, who wisely chose to greatly limit the use of CGI, and their innate ability to just show us what’s happening clearly. Unlike more recent epic greenscreen spandex-hero battles, we feel the excitement of being inside a monumental melee watching this film, while never wondering where in the hell people are in relation to each other.

If anything, the film could have spent more time on Napoleon’s military career. The original cut was apparently four hours long and, as League alumnus Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Bluesky, the kind of people who want to see a movie on Napoleon are going to prefer to watch four hours over the edited two and a half. If you’re a history geek, the current cut feels like a Cliff’s Notes version of the history, but you’ll probably know what’s going on. If not, you’re likely going to feel a bit out to sea in sections of the film. The complex politics of Revolutionary France are reduced to a handful of screaming matches and some beheadings. The invasion of Egypt is over before we have any idea who fought and died resisting it.

Alas, this Napoleon is as much a lover as a fighter. It was also inevitable that a Napoleon film would focus on his ill-fated hot and cold relationship with Marie Joséphine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, which has fascinated writers for years. Joséphine was basically an enigma — it’s clear that Napoleon was as obsessive about his first wife as he was about everything else he encountered. It’s not nearly so clear that she felt the same – although, to be fair, her notorious affairs were sort of standard operating procedure for French marriages of the time. In the role of Joséphine, Vanessa Kirby does an admirable job of conveying this enigmatic quality. It’s very clear why Napoleon obsessed over her, and was unsure of where he stood, remaining obsessed even after he left his first wife over her inability to bear him an heir.

The real problem I had with the film is it’s not clear why Joséphine and France, and all of Europe for that matter, were so obsessed with Napoleon. Joaquin Phoenix is a fairly strong actor when he’s playing fragile, awkward broken man-children. His performance in Beau is Afraid is frankly a stroke of genius. He’s not afraid to look weak, and as Napoleon, he stammers and mumbles and sniffles, and laughs awkwardly- basically emptying his entire bag of tricks- and cries a lot. He definitely has the glower down.

And yet, Phoenix never embodies the sort of personal gravitas that would might why so many soldiers and citizens followed this man into hell. If you read accounts of the time, even the people who hated Napoleon were a little in awe of him, cowed by his tremendous reserve of energy and emotion. Phoenix plays him as somnolescent, falling asleep in key meetings (perhaps meant to be a nod to the fact that the real man hardly ever slept). He also seems detached and disinterested in the things the would be assumed to care deeply about- the “Great Man” as big baby. At a certain point, I expected every other character to stop and ask “Wait- this guy??”

Maybe the larger problem is how few of our leading men actually seem like grown men. I have a hard time actually buying Joaquin Phonenix as an adult man who led a nation, and, for that matter, can’t really see Leonardo Di Caprio or Adam Driver as anything but stunted boys. The over-discussed “crisis of masculinity” probably doesn’t hold true anywhere like it does in Hollywood movies.

To be fair, the real Napoleon was certainly erratic and insecure and had a flair for the dramatic, just like the France he led. The film captures that aspect of the history perfectly well, while also conveying the paradox of a man who strode the world like a colossus, while also worrying greatly about who his wife was schtupping. And, perhaps, after Trump, it would have been difficult to stage a glorious portrayal of a self-aggrandizing blowhard. Playing Napoleon as a clown might have been the only way the filmmakers could have kept him from being totally repellant to our modern eyes.

But, Joaquin Phoenix already played a clown. And, as much as we like to see past peoples as being more foolish than ourselves, all of Europe didn’t really chase a clown into hell.

So, what are YOU watching, playing, pondering, creating, or conquering this weekend?