Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ Is a Total Mess But an Absolute Blast

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 26, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 26, 2023 |

My my. At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender. Oh yeah, and for decades before that, General Bonaparte wreaked havoc across Europe, North Africa, and Russia, gaining a reputation as a genius, a despot, an icon, and a brute. There are literally thousands of books about Napoleon, as well as myriad films, TV series, songs, and memes dedicated to dissecting, parodying, and discoursing him. Everyone has an opinion of him. So, how do you even begin to make a new version of this well-worn tale? If you’re Sir Ridley Scott, you toss history to the side and delve into a heated mish-mash of battles, narcissism, sex, and hats.

If you’re looking for the utmost fealty to the past, this film is not for you. It opens with Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette at the height of the ‘Reign of Terror’ that defined the French Revolution. That didn’t happen. He didn’t fire cannons at the Pyramids of Giza, and he didn’t dine with the Duke of Wellington. This might bother some, but for me, Scott’s mythologizing of an already heavily propagandized life was crucial to what makes Napoleon work when it’s firing on all cylinders. For Scott, this is a classic rags-to-riches story to be retold and refuted at the same time.

Bonaparte is a lowly Corsican soldier and social misfit whose brilliance on the battlefield sees him claw his way to power. As is befitting a film made by the guy who brought us Gladiator, the battle scenes are stunning. He really does make this stuff look easy, as well as merciless. In the first battle — the film is structured around a number of key battles that defined Napoleon’s career — we see bodies flying and horses massacred in frighteningly detailed fashion. The death toll of each battle is evident; the mass suffering never ignored by the camera, even if Napoleon himself is indifferent to his men’s agonies. For all who worried that Napoleon would downplay or justify the body count of Bonaparte, do not fear. It’s clear that Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa are not impressed by how this man’s intense vanity led him to such lengths.

The flipside of Bonaparte’s obsession with victory is his obsessive yearning for Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby. He cannot live without her. She doesn’t seem all that into him, except as a means of protection for a former general’s wife in a post-revolution Paris. His adoration is tough to deal with, so it’s no wonder she quickly finds a new lover, which the entirety of France knows about long before Napoleon does. His uncouth nature is in stark contrast to the steely control of Josephine, as portrayed by Kirby as charismatic without even having to make an effort. Her stillness has an allure that could only work with an actress like Kirby, so used to doing everything with nothing.

Phoenix, by contrast, is an absolute f*cking loser, and it is amazing. Still using his valley boy American accent, his Napoleon is a self-mythologizing dork who is smart enough to craft his own legend but unaware that he’s just the absolute worst to be around. He’s pompous but too insecure to stand up to his own mother. When he bellows in one man’s face about thinking he’s so great because he has boats, the sheer absurdity of this man cannot be denied (it also helps that Phoenix is a brilliant slapstick performer, best seen in one moment where he runs away from a crowd like a Hanna Barbera character.) Speaking of absurdity, there are jokes in Napoleon. This is a funny movie, deliberately so. The contrast between the ceaseless violence of the battlefield and Napoleon’s stumbling through society and marital squabbles makes for a larger-than-life expansion of a marriage story. When Napoleon is on top of the world, the battles look easy. When he is forced to divorce Josephine for the crime of not being able to provide him with a son, the fights become agonizingly drawn out. His own ego is bruised, but it doesn’t make him consider the cost of his games.

The problem with reviewing a Ridley Scott movie is that you’re keenly aware he’ll have a director’s cut of the thing you just watched on the horizon and that it will be a much richer, denser experience. He’s really the only director working today who has the luxury to release a $200 million epic and then get a longer cut with more juicy stuff jam-packed in to that same crowd. Would that all our favourite filmmakers got that opportunity. And Scott has more than proven himself with these extended editions. Kingdom of Heaven became an outright masterpiece with its director’s cut. The much-maligned neo-noir The Counselor is more caustic and perverse in Scott’s unfettered take. You could write a thesis on the various cuts of Blade Runner and how they drastically change the narrative with each redo. There is a Napoleon director’s cut on the way, to be made available on Apple TV+, and I can’t wait to see it. But it’s disheartening that the theatrical cut of this film, the one the vast majority of people will see first, has to feel like a compromise to make it happen.

Because ultimately, this still feels like a four-hour film sliced into a 140-minute one. There’s not enough time with Josephine to give their relationship the heft it demands, which leaves Phoenix and Kirby to do a lot of heavy lifting with their conflicting chemistries. What we get is so striking and crucial to the entire point of Scott’s retelling of the Bonaparte story. It’s through this torrid romance, one with routine infidelities that the French newspapers endlessly reported on, that Napoleon’s impulses and desires are filtered. Their famed love letters are used as inner monologue voiceovers, offering a contrast of rhetoric to action in terms of their marriage, then reflected further in the battle scenes. But more is needed to maintain this balance. Here’s hoping the director’s cut satisfies.

A lot of critics seem irate at Napoleon for its take on history, so lackadaisical with the truth and far more concerned with the idea of this man than his reality. Maybe there’s no literal truth in Phoenix’s pompous tyrant brat with wife issues and big loser energy, but there is power to this version of a familiar story. Scott cares more about how the myth is made and who gets to make it, and we all know how often that is defined by men like this. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to be shown as anything more than an amoral loser with an emotional support hat.

Napoleon is in theatres now.