Napoleon

Ridley Scott's Napoleon has received its fair share of criticism. Even before the premiere, the debate raged and no words were spared. It was too long, too violent, too old, too realistic, too unreal, too American. Joaquin Phoenix in turn was too tall, too old, too much Joaquin Phoenix but also too little Joaquin Phoenix. The French were offended, and the rest of Europe was secondarily offended on behalf of the French, at the way the legacy of the warmonger was treated. The fact that it was just a film whose primary purpose was most likely only to entertain a paying cinema audience seemed to have been forgotten in the debate.

Very few people mentioned how powerful Napoleon actually is. What magnificent craftsmanship its existence rests on and how much work goes into a production of this magnitude. Of course, this doesn't save a film that suffers from a few too many shortcomings for it to last its full three-hour running time, but one must not forget the visual aspect, which is one of the most impressive things you can see in an IMAX cinema. Then you have to ask yourself what expectations you should really have for a Ridley Scott film in 2023? What is reasonable to think you will get?

You hardly sit down in front of a film directed by Ridley Scott and think that there will be any greater depth or even character development, but it becomes problematic when it is a real person and a real human destiny that is to be portrayed. A story that most people actually know and not an underdog like in Gladiator. At least I expect a certain degree of accuracy and a light history lesson. I'm not asking for Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia, but I still want some kind of complex personal portrait. But Ridley Scott's glory days are also over, that should not be forgotten. He made incomparable films that were among the best of their time when he was at the peak of his career, during his own golden era, but in recent years it has been much more mediocre with films like The Last Duel and House of Gucci. Beautiful films, which also have their strengths here and there, undoubtedly so, but also far too long and with very little substance. Unfortunately, Napoleon follows the same trend.

But it starts well. Marie Antoinette is executed by guillotine in a phenomenally morbid scene that sets the tone immediately. Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) is the spectator of the highly detailed beheading and it was here among the mob that his climb up the steep career ladder began. A gradual advancement in society where no corpse was not worth stepping on in order to eventually make it all the way to the top. An enormous ego that led his troops to death with a confident hand, but as imposing and ruthless as he was on the battlefield, he was just as clumsy when it came to human relations, especially with the future Empress Josephine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), whose main task was to try in vain to produce an heir, a stately and resilient son who could take over the military business when the end came.

And even here things started well. When they first met in 1795, Napoleon began writing love letters to Josephine. Texts filled with poetry, warmth and passion, promises of eternal love. Then it turned out that this new-found love was only very temporary and soon developed into a toxic relationship, to say the least, where power and the grandiose self-image were far more important than empathy and tenderness. This, of course, is in keeping with the character and story, where she mocked him for his low social status and he in turn scandalised his family by marrying a widow with children. Both were lying around left and right and one lover and mistress after another were invited to the imperial bedroom, that's the way it was. Napoleon's terrible temperament is well documented here too, there is, after all, a reason for the epithet Napoleon complex, an excessively aggressive or dominant social behaviour that compensates for a person's physical or social deficiencies.

The problem is that this isn't felt, the emotional depth is limited, the portrait is faded. Kirby really doesn't have much to work with in a role that's as one-dimensional as it gets and what she actually delivers is often underwhelming, a far cry from her award-winning performance as Margaret in The Crown. Phoenix is usually stable. After all, he very rarely has a bad day at work, but at the same time he is extremely limited in the role of the mumbling Napoleon and it is not his fault, but here again the biggest blame must fall on Scott and his screenwriter, David Scarpa. They simply cannot handle such a multifaceted personality as Napoleon, and here he comes across as extremely uninteresting and for long moments even downright sad.

With quotes like "I follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Caesar", I at least expect it to be magnificent from start to finish, but it never is. If you compare with Gladiator, which is not unreasonable to do, that film was much better at telling the story of Maximus than Napoleon is at telling the story of Napoleon. In fact, even Phoenix's character Commodus was a far more powerful portrayal. None of the things that made Gladiator the modern classic it is now considered to be can be found here. The cerebral and psychological aspects of Napoleon's ambition, success and failure are either completely missing or could have been highlighted with more innovative approaches instead of just hinting at them through the plot. Not even the political intrigue and propaganda are given much space.

The film's strength lies instead in depicting the many and long epic battles that fill the entire screen with blood and body parts. Horses and people that I can look at in the smallest anatomical detail as they are torn apart to the sound of muffled ominous drums and this is what Ridley Scott has mastered. He knows this inside and out and here Napoleon can absolutely compete with Gladiator. This is certainly not where the problems lie. Or as a famous singer would have put it. Scott has 99 problems but battles ain't one.

When we arrive in Waterloo, that is, the bitter end of the saga of Napoleon after an incredible number of twists and turns, I know no more about him than when I parked myself in the cinema seat almost three hours before and that is of course a big problem in a film about Napoleon.