Napoleon
A better movie to connect them is what Ridley Scott’s big-budget war epic “Napoleon” boils down to. It again shows Scott’s adeptness, but this time in the direction of a deeply uninteresting screenplay where every important event in the life of its subject comes across without enough passion or purpose and fails to link up with another one in any kind of meaningful way. An amazing actor becomes a ghostly presence halfway through the film, and his partner the character who should have been the film’s beating heart is flat as a board. But when things go boom in “Napoleon,” they undeniably go boom memorably. It’s everything else that loses the war.
David Scarpa’s script tries to pack too much life into one movie, chronicling Napoleon Bonaparte’s (Joaquin Phoenix) rise to power and his warmongering ways that resulted in millions of deaths among his people before ending with his death on St. Helena in 1821. The picture naturally begins during the French Revolution as Bonaparte rises through France’s political ranks on military success above all else. An early sequence depicting the Siege of Toulon in 1793 is a real eye opener, presented by Scott with startling detail and extreme violence. As Bonaparte leads a nighttime assault on a fortification overlooking the harbor where he hopes to bring artillery ships through, Phoenix does nicely nerves wise here more human than he will be for most of what follows, regrettably and it has riveting specificity throughout, from a cannonball tearing open a horse’s chest cavity to figures aflame as they leap from burning ships.
The Siege of Toulon makes Bonaparte heroic enough for Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), an arresting beauty who was married off young by her father and then spent most of her teenage years as a prisoner during the Reign of Terror. She meets Napoleon in 1795. In Scott’s film, it is the letters from Napoleon to Josephine that are meant to provide backbone and therefore heat but the project never yields anything more than a choice like that. After they meet, the real Napoleon wrote to Josephine, “I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.” The sentiment gets voiceovered here but not infused into a movie that is remarkably flat emotionally for how it treats an awful lot of history. Part of the problem is Kirby can’t get a handle on what to play with Josephine, who becomes too much of a mirror for Napoleon before disappearing into her well-known failure as a wife and woman who couldn’t produce an heir which led to their divorce. “Napoleon” needs as many of its conversations in overheated rooms after sumptuous meals as it does on battlefields. It doesn’t.
Josephine seems to have given Napoleon the self-assurance required to become one of mankind’s most infamous warmongers, a man who frequently used war as the solution for everything and led millions to their graves. A character study of a public figure who often lacks depth in conventional history lessons would fit nicely into this space. Was Napoleon a type of leader whose own insecurities caused bloodshed an archetype we’ve seen throughout time? It’s here and there, but Scarpa and Scott aren’t interested in saying anything about Napoleon or men like him, then or now. I am so disappointed by how “Napoleon” takes such a just the facts approach to the political and world landscapes that usually teem with relatability and depth in this filmmaker’s stories. And Phoenix has nothing to hang his hooks into here except for an occasional surprising choice, it is one of his least interesting performances ever. It feels like he didn’t want to go all in on the “mad leader” archetype and chew scenery but also didn’t find anything else to fill that void.
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