Ridley Scott’s latest historical blockbuster Napoleon whizzes through the emperor’s action-packed life, says Ferdie Rous.
In this highly episodic retelling, Ridley Scott slaps up a broad sweeping tableau of Napoleon’s life. From the field of Austerlitz to the burned-out husk of Moscow and the packed hall of Robespierre’s National Convention, we skim through Le Petit Caporal’s triumphs and disasters.
In two and a half hours, Scott covers the entirety of Napoleon’s professional life – from his courtship of Josephine through the multiple coups that brought him to power and around the world, on campaign or in exile – all of a quarter-century.
By zipping through Napoleon’s life as David Scarpa’s screenplay does, the audience gets a superficial impression of the different episodes and their characters – and the highly convoluted plots and intrigue of revolutionary politics and diplomacy are glossed over with agonising brevity.
The supporting cast is a little two-dimensional, too. In his ten minutes on screen, Rupert Everett’s Duke of Wellington barely has time to scrunch his nose and curl his lip into a sarcastic scowl.
The one constant through this racing narrative, whose cast seems to change every 20 minutes, is the beautiful and sultry Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby. No stranger to playing royalty, having spent two seasons as Princess Margaret in The Crown, Kirby gives a powerful and seductive impression of French aristocracy, at once superior to and nervous of her parvenu lover.
As Napoleon’s conquest and career take him overseas, the love story unfolds through their correspondence: much of it one-sided as Napoleon begs for affection and certainty as he battles with tales of her infidelity.
It is strange to see an actress playing Josephine, famous as one of history’s “older women”, so much younger than her paramour. At 49, Joaquin Phoenix (who set a benchmark for demented royalty when he played Commodus in Scott’s Gladiator) is only two years younger than Boney was on his death bed.
Subsequently, the uncomfortable scenes of their early courting take on a decidedly creepy tone. Josephine dominates him, even when he seems to have the upper hand. This one-sided dynamic of the love affair at the heart of Napoleon robs the man of any agency. The overall effect clangs against the efforts made to highlight his military prowess.
Scott’s repeated nods to the number of men who fell in Napoleon’s pursuit of his own glory testifies to the ruthless competence of the battlefield persona that brought Europe to its knees. Resolute and calm only in battle, Phoenix’s take on Napoleon is breathy and petulant in the diplomatic and political settings but anxious and heartless in the relative domesticity of palace and dining room.
Napoleon, who comes to be rather ridiculous, is seen as a thug and outsider to his wife, subordinates and enemies. Of course, he is at his most petulant when dealing with his greatest foe: les Anglais.
There is a marked and clearly rather enjoyed air of English condescension towards the French. Napoleon is made to look a right fool when, confronted by the British ambassador, he shouts: “You think you’re so great because you have boats.”
But the Englishness rears its head in another manner. Napoleon’s outsider status is reinforced by the decision to allow Phoenix the use of his native accent among his mostly British co-stars. He is an American ship on a very British ocean. It’s a bit of a double whammy. There is something rather absurd about hearing “Vive la France!” belted from a dozen charging soldiers in tones more at home in a Guy Ritchie gangland romp.
In spite of its disregard for military history, given the race against time, Napoleon excels on the battlefield. The rolling blast of cannon fire, the crack of musket and mortar and the screams of the injured and dying are brought together with violent clarity in a torrent of noise.
As visually visceral as it is aurally, it is an uncomfortably physical experience for the audience. Overlaying all of this is Martin Phipps’s score, which seamlessly adapts to the character and place of each scene much as to the era as a whole through a mélange of music from the period and some careful composition. As he advances eastward, battles and campaigns are scored by sonorous Slavic chants and Kyries that foreshadow the funereal results of the march on Moscow.
Compelling though its battles might be, as a film Napoleon tries to do too much.
Covering so large an expanse of time at such speed offers too simple a rendering of the history, which in turn becomes window-dressing for two grand narratives that could really be two separate films of their own: a torrid rom-dram about Josephine and a biopic of the ambitious tyrant himself.
It’s a fun couple of hours, but it comes across a little “Two World Wars and One World Cup” from this very Anglo-Saxon production team.
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