Movie Review : Napoleon (2023)
No one ever asked for a Napoleon movie. Even if someone did, that person most likely didn’t ask for a three hours long, American made movie about French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte with a bunch of english-speaking actors cosplaying as French revolutionaries. That fact itself is somehow Ridley Scott's Napoleon’s biggest calling card. How can such a lush, expensive film no one ever wanted can be any good? It HAS to be a train wreck, right?
While it’s ferociously dispassionate about its own topic, Napoleon is alright. I feel like it’s appropriately twisted and nihilistic for the historical events it is covering.
In case you flunked tenth grade history, Napoleon is the story of French emperor and autocratic nutcase Napoleon Bonaparte (appropriately played by Joaquin Phoenix), who used the revolution against the royalty to put himself in power. As it is often the case when there is political turmoil, local population goes back and forth on what it is that it believes it wants and ends up giving full powers to just one guy again. That guy fucking loves to go to war.
A World Without Heroes
What makes a sweeping historical epic like Napoleon boring and predictable is the good ol’ moral storytelling arc. Especially when dealing with a blood crazed figure like Napoleon Bonaparte: he was a decent bloke at heart, but got corrupted by power and happened to realize this on his deathbed. That would be required to "get the audience to relate to the protagonist", which is seen as crucial for such an expensive movie.
But this is not what happens here. This movie is adorably sleazy. Ridley Scott (and his screenwriter David Scarpa) portray the French revolution as this dangerous, volatile time where so many opportunistic shitbags surfaced and jockeyed for power. Napoleon was just one of them, who happened to lead France to victory in a key battle against the British. He was fierce and violent and awarded himself whatever respect he wasn’t automatically granted.
Scott and Scarpa illustrate this idea quite cleverly through his relationship to Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) who is using the hell out of her second husband in order to uphold social status. Napoleon just wanted a son from her, like Mike Muir from hardcore band Suicidal Tendencies wanted a Pepsi, but that lone task proves to be difficult for the empress who’d rather bang anyone but her short, weird king.
Phoenix and Kirby have this twitchy, herky jerky dynamic together that doesn’t call attention to itself, but that fuels the power couple’s bizarreness nonetheless. Always gone on some genocidal campaign, Napoleon actualizes that desire for love and respect he cannot get when he acts normal by slaughtering the shit out of foreign nation. Is this reprehensible? Fuck yeah, but these were reprehensible time. It’s important that they’re not depicted as sexy.
Ridley Scott makes a point of being unsexy in the first scene by showing you Marie Antoinette’s beheading in all the needless detail you can imagine. It’s intense, but important
The Spectacle of Combat
The other important aspect of Napoleon is its combat scenes. They are both appropriately spectacular for a movie of this magnitude, but they stand out by how anxiety inducing they are. As you don’t really have anyone to root for (to properly speak of), the spectacle is not of someone overcoming the odds, but rather of how gruesome death was in that day and age. One scene where the French defeat the Austrian army is particularly haunting.
But the absence of combat created the most dreadful scenes in Napoleon. In his Russian campaign, where Alexander’s troops deserted and burned down cities behind them, you can hear the anticipation in silence, the foreboding in the echo of the emperor’s footsteps in empty palaces. These are great, unlikely atmospheric scenes in a type of movie where atmosphere rarely plays an important part. That was an angle on combat scenes that made Napoleon feel unique.
*
So, is Napoleon good? For a movie about the French that so thoroughly doesn’t give a fuck about the French, I’d say it is! It’s bleak, oddly violent in unexpected ways and it offers visuals that sweeping historical epics don’t often have. Is it great? I wouldn’t watch it once a year or anything like that, but I’d rewatch this with bros to play a drinking game any time. Ridley Scott completely failed at delivering a serious movie, but ended up capturing the spirit of the times much better than anticipated anyway.
