In that slouch he captures all the indifference we feel
dir: Ridley Scott
2023
It’s not like this guy is an unknown; a neglected personage in human history. It almost seems like a hubristic cliché to be one of the most successful directors, commercially and critically in the medium of film, and to then decide in your 80s that you’re going to do a Napoleon biopic.
Like you’ve finally earned that honour. But the thing is, film nerd though I might be, I cannot actually remember there being any other decent films about the Corsican dictator.
I remember chintzy television mini-series from when I was a kid and a prestige mini-series was a Big Deal, for some reason. I remember one clearly with Armand Assante playing the little corporal, and maybe Jacqueline Bisset as Josephine?
I don’t remember if it was good, I just remember that it existed. And that it was more entertaining than this.
And I remember a film with Ian Holm about the last years of the tinpot despot’s life in exile on St Helena, turned into a sweet and mawkish what if? speculative fictional story, which was all right(ish).
And I remember that the Napoleon in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure really enjoyed the water slides at the San Dimas water park.
Like, he *really* enjoyed the heck out of those slides.
Ridley Scott got however much money he got from Apple TV, got Joaquin Phoenix, a fairly accomplished and acclaimed actor he’s worked with before, got access to all sorts of fancy regal places and palaces, and put together a film…
The point of this film… I am not sure, but after 2 hours and nearly 40 minutes, I think the point of the flick is that Napoleon maybe was great on the battlefield (half of the time), but sucked in almost every other measurable way as a person and as a man?
I don’t usually do this, because, spoilers, but at the end of the film, when captions on the screen usually give a summary of just how great the subject of the movie was, what their lasting legacy was, Scott elects for the ending scrawl to read something like “Napoleon started 61 battles”. Then it lists all the people who died in those famous battles. And the last bit o’ information is that all these battles in the so-called Napoleonic Wars, resulted in the deaths of 3 million people.
It's a pretty definitive full stop. It’s hard to interpret that as anything other than “wow, this guy did some terrible stuff with nothing to show for it.”
I was not under any illusions before this film that Napoleon was that great a human being. But if I ever needed confirmation, well, here it is.
A lot of critiques of the flick mention that despite the film’s length, and 2 hours and 40 minutes should be enough to tell any story, say that a threatened 4 hour plus version could perhaps fill out the story with more detail and connective tissue giving us, the baffled fuckers in the audience, a better appreciation of the times, of the stakes in the battles, of the reasons for the battles, and more details that would connect the man and the times for our benefit.
To that concept I say – fuck that. Two more hours of whatever the fuck Joaquin Phoenix is doing here would be two more hours of torture.
If we believe that the most important relationship, with its own Oedipal complexities, is between Napoleon and Josephine, honestly, anyone that has seen this: you would want to see more scenes of them together? More scenes of Phoenix thumping her from behind as she stares dead-eyed into the middle distance? More scenes of them not connecting like human beings at all, as he makes grunting horse noises implying he needs to have sex with her? More scenes of food fights, of him whining at her over his jealousy, his feelings of inadequacy, more scenes of her looking like she’d rather be anywhere else, with anyone else?
As Phoenix reads in voice over cringeworthy excerpts from Napoleon’s letters, I just felt like *ouch*, this is not a love story for the ages between two star-crossed lovers, this is an unpleasant and one-sided debacle.
When the widow Josephine is released from the Bastille at the end of the Reign of Terror, after the (first) revolution has cut off the heads of tens of thousands of aristocrats, she is lucky to be alive, but she looks like someone who’s done too much to stay alive in order to be able to return to life as per usual. When Napoleon starts grunting towards her, she (Vanessa Kirby) looks at him the way any survivor looks at a mark wondering how best he’ll keep her in the luxury she was accustomed to.
For most of the time, especially when she’s shagging a young toyboy, she looks like she’d be ecstatic to be anywhere other than wherever the fuck Napoleon is. Even when he’s reading out his letters, and we’re supposed to be imagining her reading the letters, she looks bored out of her aristocratic mind.
When the Napster makes his play for her, she has the weirdest scene where, after implying she fucked half the Bastille or more to survive, she tells him that what she hides under her skirts entrances the unwary and lures sailors to their deaths.
As she inches her skirts up… I’m almost afraid, and then it cuts away.
Whatever life she displays in that scene disappears from the rest of the movie. She has a few weird, “playful” scenes with the lead idiot as they fuss with his stupid hat sometimes, or they have these weird arguments, which seem a bit unrehearsed, perhaps deliberately.
I think, at a certain point in the film, we pretty much understand that, there’s a revolution, and then the jerks in control of people getting their heads cut off (Robespierre) get their heads cut off. And then, something something, Napoleon declares himself the first Emperor of France, and crowns himself and Josephine during their coronation.
That’s it, that’s really it. Win a battle at Toulon against the English, kill some Royalists, something something, you’re now Emperor.
I… well, it happened, we can’t dispute that, so what’s the point of explaining how or why, I guess. Maybe we should know why the revolution resulted in Napoleon seizing power and re-establishing a monarchy that the revolution fought to get rid of.
No-one close to this film thought it mattered enough to explain. But these are just quibbles. These complaints are like ants at the feet of Alexander the Great – utterly beneath the notice of great men like the ones involved here.
If I’m right, and I’m probably not, I believe this flick delivers exactly what Ridley Scott wanted – which is a film that looks epic, but which undercuts the Great Man narrative of history, and shows that a celebrated leader was really a bit of a buffoon, whose successes could never make up for all the things he got wrong for so many people. I have to assume that Phoenix gives the intended performance that was wanted, because he is pretty much repellent throughout the whole flick, and is mostly so understated it feels like he doesn’t even want to be there either.
It's an anti-charismatic performance, which is weird because Phoenix can usually be counted upon to put in great, weird performances even in flicks that don’t work (I never liked that Joker film, but the problem wasn’t Phoenix’s performance).
Here, well, I did pretty much just want it all to be over.
The battle at Austerlitz, against the Austrians and the Russians, probably is the military highlight of the flick (if you’re a fan of that kind of thing, and if you’re not a white middle-aged jerk who reads books about war, like an absolute arsehole, you’re probably not), which is a painful thing to say about a flick that has lots of battles in it. The march on Moscow, and the death march back, well, anyone that’s watched a version of War & Peace or read the book knows a bit about that whole pointless endeavour, but one question a viewer could be asking themselves is “why?”
The depiction of it in War & Peace is one of the most beautiful and desolate scenes in literature written in any language, ever. The depiction here? Not so much. Not as memorable.
Why are all these people being maimed or killed? I don’t think anyone literalises it, but I guess the unspoken assertion is that there really was nothing good about any of it, but hey, says Ridley Scott, check out all this cool military bullshit anyway!
Napoleon gives no grand speeches, leads cavalry charges (that never happened) that don’t do anything, has calm conversations with people who don’t want to talk to him, and can’t quite see that the best thing for Europe would be if he wasn’t around anymore.
They get rid of him, and then he comes back. Like a certain other orange emperor that they got rid of in a certain empire, but who keeps coming back and won’t stay away, because his ego won’t allow it.
They never explain how it is that Napoleon comes back from Elba and just decides, “actually, I want to continue being Emperor” and they just let him. They just let him!
So then we can have Waterloo. There is only one good thing about the Battle of Waterloo as depicted here. Rupert Everett is fantastic as the Duke of Wellington. He’s great, storming about with all the energy, all the cunning, all the brilliance that you used to hear people lauding Napoleon for.
Maybe the flick should have been about him. I mean, after he defeats Napoleon, it’s the longest period of peace in Europe that they’ve known for ages, up to the Crimean War. Almost as if the greatest impediment to peace was the French and their awful champion…
I dunno. Maybe it’s the point of the film. I’m pretty sure it is the point. I’m just not sure that it made for an enjoyable viewing experience.
6 times this was an unpleasant experience, like a colonoscopy, but without as many benefits out of 10
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“You think you’re so great because you have boats!” – this is an actual line from the film - Napoleon
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