NEVADA COUNTY, Calif. December 3, 2023 – If you love spectacle for spectacle’s sake, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon will provide Nevada County residents with another excuse to turn off the TV and go to a movie.
Scott is among the last of the old-time filmmakers who are striving to keep the historical epic alive in our diminished times. With typical dash, he’s taken us back to the glory days of Ben Hur (1950) and Spartacus (1960), directing his latest film down to the last shiny uniform button with a mix of superb technique, rich surface detail, and high polish.
Napoleon (now playing at The Onyx in Nevada City and The Sutton in Grass Valley) marches along in formation, one opulent tableaux following on another, sight and sound woven into a grand tapestry, with eye-filling design, great cinematography, and music and thrilling battle scenes. There are moments when you feel you are there, caught in the colorful tumult of the Napoleonic era.
Unfortunately, in its drive to be a cannonball dive into the pool of holiday films, Napoleon makes a smaller splash than it should. In the long march of films about Napoleon Bonaparte, it has a lot to live up to, starting with Abel Gance’s five-plus-hour version from 1927.
When it comes to the drama of Bonaparte, Scott’s film plays like most other biopics: a near-shapeless highlight reel that trips over the same snags that plague all “factual fictions”: namely, issues of accuracy, bias, and emphasis. One bias is its condemnation of war. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it only comes across cursorily, never as strong as it might, even with the title card summing up the deaths incurred.
Even casual European history buffs will pick up on another slant: France and Britain have been touchy opponents and prickly rivals since the Battle of Hastings in 1066 CE. Napoleon is, of course, a hero of France, a man who belongs to their history more than anyone else’s. This Napoleon, however, is a primarily British appropriation, filmed everywhere but in France, with nary a Frenchmen seen, or a real French accent heard. It doesn’t feel “French” at all but more like a BBC exercise in French cosplay. The sets and costumes are excellent, but the characterizations are perfunctory at best. It sneers at Napoleon like a Tory toff would, most glaringly with Rupert Everett playing the Duke of Wellington who, appearing at the Battle of Waterloo, scoffs at his formidable opponent as he might a street urchin.
Many an historian and history buff avoid films like this altogether in the firm belief that “they never get it right.” And no, they certainly don’t. Historians and artists have different agendas when it comes to history. It’s fruitless—even silly–to expect any “factual fiction” to both capture history’s huge sprawl and adhere to the stringent standards set by professional historians. Truthfully, the story of Napoleon may be too big for any film to embrace.
Napoleon makes its share of alterations to the historical record—among them the Battle of Austerlitz, where there was no “massacre on the ice.” To this tolerant viewer, most of the alterations seem harmless but it’s not unreasonable to hope that Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa would at least capture Napoleon in his unique spirit if not in pure fact. In this, they fail.
Sure, Napoleon Bonaparte was a war-mongering tyrant, fanatic egoist and dangerous fool who could be fairly said to have helped set the stage for Hitler, Stalin, and other genocidal totalitarian visionaries. Yet, unlike most, he was also a fascinating and brilliant personality, a genuine “Man of the Enlightenment” who held, in some respects, a “progressive” view of the world, along with the god-like arrogance that he was the one to make it all happen. (I take most of my information from Andrew Roberts’ huge 2014 biography.)
Enormously intelligent and intellectually agile, Napoleon was a passionate bookworm who dragged a large library everywhere with him. He was also a whirling dervish who hated sleep and got as little of it as possible. A Mickey Rooney dancing on the ramparts of history, he tore through his relatively short life—and across Europe and around the Mediterranean–like a tornado, while writing tens of thousands of letters on every conceivable subject. His letters not only covered war and politics but also science, philosophy, art, religion and, most significantly, his vision of government, which eventually became the Napoleonic Code and provided the foundation of the modern nation-state.
Napoleon was quite a man to know: a meddling motormouth, witty, opinionated, sociable and, unlike Hitler and Stalin, a welcome dinner guest and host, beloved by his staff and even many of his troops, whose welfare he fussed over even as he relentlessly, and cruelly, marched them to their doom. He was a fascinating paradox of the admirable and the awful.
Drawing a cinematic portrait of such a man is a hard task—what would you leave out, and how would you shape what remains? With so much drama to choose from, Scott and Scarpa have chosen to reduce Napoleon–his brains, larger-than-life personality, and hunger for power to a man small of spirit, a hollow-eyed ghoul and mulish adolescent, stomping like a grumpy stallion with horny love for Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and opaque to everyone else.
Why and how did this master propagandist persuade his nation to crown him emperor, not even twenty years after they fought a bloody revolution to dethrone all kings forever? How could so many follow him so far into such disaster, all the way to Moscow? Damned if I could find even a hint of interest here. Leo Tolstoy treated him with equal scorn in his great novel, War and Peace, but even with his pro-Russian bias the author treats Napoleon with some curiosity. The film has little, leaving it hollow at the center.
In Joaquin Phoenix, Scott and Scarpa have the best actor possible for their semi-satiric reduction. Phoenix seems to have overlaid his superb performance in Beau is Afraid right onto Napoleon, going from the story of Job, God’s Suffering Servant, to Job, Petulant Empire Builder. Phoenix’s huge dark eyes and gravelly voice are excellent tools for conveying pain, sorrow, and insanity (seen in his portrayal of Commodus in Gladiator). But in conveying one leader’s visionary ambition and energy, he falls flat.
Historians have been especially up in arms over this film. Normally, I would shrug this off, but Ridley Scott hasn’t helped matters with his public responses, among them “Were you there?” that more reminded me of an old-time vaudeville gag (“Ver you zer, Charlie?”) than a thoughtful defense. “No, no one living now was there . . . and neither, were you, Ridley Scott.”
But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. From the perspective of two hundred years, and trapped in our presentism, Napoleon may seem hardly relevant at all. But he is relevant in ways that are more visible than he is in this film. Beyond its great spectacle, Napoleon may encourage some of its millions of viewers to learn more about this strangely compelling figure and take what lessons they can.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark.