‘Napoleon’ Review: Ridley Scott Ricochets Between the Battlefield and Bedroom in Bloated Take on French Despot

A chyron that appears at the end of Napoleon, after two and a half hours of turgid spectacle and grime-encrusted showmanship, informs that Frances self-anointed emperor oversaw 61 battles, listing the six that director Ridley Scott opted to stage for our benefit or for his own glory. The directors motives are unclear, much like those of Napoleon Bonaparte as played by Joaquin Phoenix, who gives a mumbly and oddly anti-charismatic performance as the figure short, slender and something of an outsider, owing to his Corsican birth who came to rule France after the revolution.

Here, from the master of the modern epic, comes an undeniably impressive technical achievement: a bombastic old-school great man movie of the sort that dominated Hollywood in the late 50s and early 60s. But times are not the same, and though Scott is wise to which way the wind blows (he demonstrated as much in his medieval-reckoning movie The Last Duel), hes less sure about how best to position such a biopic for a moment fed up with power-hungry patriarchs.

Both Scott and Phoenix embrace a touch of camp, portraying the enigma that was Napoleon as a petulant brat-cum-military genius: someone who knew how to get his way on the battlefield, but resorted to food fights at home. As written by David Scarpa, Napoleon tilts a great deal of the attention away from its title character and toward the mans wife, Josephine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby).

Theirs is a great passion, to the extent that Napoleon abandons his mission in Egypt to sail home and confront Josephine when he learns of liaisons shes been entertaining in his absence. But every time she appears on-screen, it distracts from the films main selling point: expansive, cast-of-hundreds combat scenes that prove both Napoleons keen military strategy and Scotts gift for staging such clashes.

From the modern Mogadishu firefight in Black Hawk Down to the 12th-century siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, Scott has ample experience with plunging audiences into intense immersive warfare. Here, he takes a step back, embracing the widescreen format and filming as Abel Gance (in the three-screen finale of his 1927 silent Napoleon) and Sergei Bondarchuk (for his Soviet-era War and Peace epic) did: letting an entire battlefield fill the frame, surveyed from on high by Napoleon himself, who stands stoically, communicating his orders with as little as a head nod at times.

Scott tracks Napoleons career from his days as a promising young officer who witnessed the guillotining of Marie Antoinette (one of Scarpas many poetic licenses) to his exile on the island of St. Helena. Though Josephine died seven years before him, she gets the last word in this telling not that anyone would mistake this for being her movie. Dense without feeling rushed, then done without ever having really sprung to life, Napoleon seems determined to cover a great deal of ground over its not-insignificant running time.

The film opens with a brilliant military victory at Toulon, where the 24-year-old major captured the citys artillery and turned it against the Spanish and British ships occupying the port. In one shot, Napoleon is charging the city walls when a cannonball strikes his horses chest, sending the animal and its rider somersaulting backward. Pinned beneath the beast, the bloody young officer heaves himself to his feet and carries on with the siege. Its not often that a filmmaker manages to deliver an image of war that audiences havent seen before, and this early example sets a high bar.

Whenever the director and his protagonist find themselves on the battlefield, Napoleon reminds what a pantheon-level talent Scott is. He orchestrates staggeringly complex scenes in such a way that we can intuit the broad strategy, even as he scars us with horrifying details, like a drummer vaporized by a cannon blast or a massive army sunk to the bottom of a frozen lake at the Battle of Austerlitz. Still, the movie may well send audiences back to their history books for an explanation of something so fundamental as why the French dictator is warmongering at all.

Phoenix is largely accountable for this confusion, as he bends the iconic character to his own brand: that of the insecure, antisocial man-child which is an unorthodox take on Napoleon, to say the least. Apart from the hat, his silhouette isnt that of Napoleon. The actors soft-spoken approach spares him the indignity of performing with a hammy foreign accent (Scott isnt falling into that trap again after House of Gucci), and yet, Napoleon did speak differently from his peers in the French court, hailing as he did from the island of Corsica a key detail all but lost in this telling. The movie requires Phoenix to play the character across more than three decades, but he only looks the part toward the end. Early on, he appears more grizzled than commanding officer Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim); later, the passage of time merely makes him look stockier and more unshaved.

While Scott includes moments that recast the popular image of Napoleon as when hes shown looking terrified, scrambling down the stairs and into the arms of his troops during the coup dtat that elevated him to First Consul of France his approach doesnt feel revisionist so much as incomplete. Thats surprising, since the script takes on far more than audiences have asked for as it is, to the extent that Napoleon ultimately suffers from the same problem as its subject: The films ambitions are greater than the people demand, as Scott bites off more than he can manage.

If the goal was to reevaluate Napoleons career in the context of whatever power Josephine held over him, then surely it could have done with fewer battle scenes and a sharper depiction of the whos-controlling-whom dynamic between them. In the end, Napoleon seems less enamored with its subject than any previous telling of his exploits, referencing the 3 million lives lost under his campaigns. Scott may be skeptical of the man, but he cant resist the desire to re-create some of historys most notorious conflicts, and so psychology is sacrificed for the sake of spectacle.