You may expect this review of Napoleon to dwell on the historical inaccuracies that occur throughout the film—especially since I’m currently teaching History 114: The French Revolution and Napoleon this semester. Such a focus, however, would lead to a long, tedious, and pedantic essay. Moreover, the inaccuracies are not the film’s greatest fault; they are intertwined with a much larger problem—a failure of storytelling. Napoleon cannot decide which tale it wishes to relate. Is it a story about Napoleon the military genius? The revolutionary authoritarian? The disruptive diplomatist? The charismatic leader? The lover and husband? The man? It’s true these various stories overlap, but a filmmaker must prioritize one, and that is exactly what Ridley Scott fails to do. Napoleon ends up becoming a pastiche of vignettes—some poorly chosen—that seeks to capture all the different faces of Napoleon. To cram these vignettes into a reasonable running time, Scott is compelled to take a variety of narrative shortcuts that include gross oversimplifications and important omissions, all of which contribute to significant distortions. The film labors mightily to forge the whole mass into a single plot through a variety of unsubtle techniques—captions identifying various historical figures, voiceovers of Napoleon reading his letters to Josephine (“I’m now marching on Moscow. . . .”), huge canvas maps draped on the floors of his palaces to show his marshals where exactly Moscow is, various historical figures pontifically declaring what must have been obvious to everyone at the time, and so on. Although the film consumes more than two-and-half hours, these contrivances are not enough to shape a coherent and meaningful narrative arc. Who Napoleon was, what his empire was all about, what made the man tick, why he was successful for so long, why he eventually failed, and why so many people were willing to follow him—all of that remains unexplained
Joaquin Phoenix’s acting is not part of the solution. One wonders if Phoenix felt compelled to use a number of quirks to portray Napoleon because the script does not seem terribly interested in interpreting the emperor or his motives. Overall, Phoenix’s ageless character appears cranky, scowling, slow-moving, and generally laconic. Even when he cavorts with Josephine, he seems like an old soul. This portrayal doesn’t add up to what we know of the real Napoleon, a restless, ambitious, and energetic man who possessed an inexhaustibly fertile mind, believed he could solve any problem, suffered from an invincible optimism, and dominated others partly through an almost hypnotic charisma.
In a film of this sort, there isn’t much space for character development among the supporting cast. Because she receives more screen time than anyone but Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby finds sufficient room to produce a credible Josephine. The film suggests that after several initial missteps, Josephine skillfully played what few cards she had to maintain her autonomy in a terribly unequal relationship. For the empress, it seems, the only thing worse than remaining in the marriage was to be expelled from it. Here, as elsewhere, though, Scott only scratches the surface in depicting a complicated relationship.
Other secondary and tertiary characters have much less scope for elaboration and are condemned to play a single note. Such is the case with Alexander I (Edouard Philipponnat), who is made out simply as a callow and naïve youth (even though he was almost 30 by the time he met Napoleon at Tilsit). And then there’s the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon’s nemesis (played by a choleric Rupert Everett), who acts like a grumpy, elderly uncle who’s never been impressed by anything in his life. Calaincourt (Ben Miles), Emperor Francis II (Miles Jupp), Metternich (Tom Godwin), and Talleyrand (Paul Rhys), yes, even Talleyrand, flit across the screen, dry as dust, like mummies. The general idea seems to be that wooden acting passes for early 19th-century aristocratic manners.
If the film’s greatest fault is its failure to say something significant about Napoleon, the greatest disappointments are the battle scenes. Nick Schager has written a piece in the Daily Beast entitled, “’Napoleon’ Proves That Ridley Scott is Our Greatest War Director.” Schager rests his case on Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, Exodus: Gods and Kings—and Napoleon. Since not all of these are “war movies,” what he seems to mean is Scott is proficient at crafting excellent battle scenes. This is a debatable point, but comparing the opening of Gladiator to the fighting in Napoleon is instructive. The former is not exactly “realistic;” even German barbarians would have known better than to meet the Roman army for a stand-up fight in a clearing of the latter’s choosing. But the scene tells an important story. Maximus is a loyal servant of the emperor as well as the charismatic and courageous leader of a well-oiled war machine that destroys its enemies with great brutality. The barbarians’ courage avails them nothing against superior Roman discipline, organization, and tactics. If the scene is false in its details, it is true in its larger point. And it sets the table for the rest of the film.
The problem with the battles in Napoleon is they do no such thing. Yes, in the film, Napoleon is brave at Toulon and devious at Austerlitz (the Waterloo scene reveals little about the emperor). Yet Scott does not tax his audience much by revealing anything more complex about Napoleon as a military leader. Napoleon nods slightly to an underling, and huge masses of soldiers hurtle pell-mell at one another without much order to create a portentous spectacle. There is no attempt to give viewers any insight into the complexities of command in the early 19th century and Napoleon’s strengths as a general—nothing about conducting the operational art, penetrating the fog of war, reading the battlefield, and owning one’s decisions.
On social media, there is much chatter about how Napoleon will affect the public’s understanding of history. The school of thought that dwells on the film’s inaccuracies (they are, indeed, legion) worries audiences will leave theaters with a mistaken impression of the French emperor. A more charitable school hopes the movie, despite its errors, will inspire interest in the past. Both schools are wrong. Judging from the reactions of the group with whom I saw the film, it’s clear that a movie which doesn’t tell an intelligible—let alone a compelling—story cannot influence our historical understanding for better or for worse. Indeed, if anything, it may convince many that history is a boring, formless mass of details. Even worse, “Hollywood” (I place the phrase in quotes because the film was backed by Apple TV+) may draw the lesson that sweeping historical dramas are box office poison when the real problem is that such dramas have been badly made.
Professor Hugh Dubrulle
One Thing after Another 