Done With Bonaparte
For practically as long as cinema has existed, the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte has alternately intrigued and vexed its most ambitious practitioners. In 1927, French filmmaker Abel Gance produced a massive epic retelling of Napoleon’s early years that was meant to be the first of a series of films chronicling his life (a plan that was scrapped after the difficulties in financing and producing the first one) and which, following its failed American release, languished in semi-obscurity for years until a restoration under the aegis of silent film historian Kevin Brownlow brought it back to the public eye. Marlon Brando played Napoleon in Desiree in order to stave off a potential lawsuit for walking away from another project and his disinterest could be felt in nearly every scene. Having successfully made a screen version of War and Peace, in which Napoleon figured, Russian filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk decided to tackle him again in 1970 with Waterloo, in which Rod Steiger hammed it up in a depiction of the infamous battle that was an impressive technical achievement but proved to be a major box-office failure when it was released. Most notoriously, Stanley Kubrick planned his own epic take on the man, spending years compiling research, writing a screenplay and planning the production (which was to star Jack Nicholson) before abandoning it, due in no small part to the calamitous reception that Waterloo received.
Even with that less-than-stellar track record (coupled with the fact that Napoleon’s most memorable film depictions have tended to be the comedic piss-takes seen in films like Woody Allen’s Love and Death, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and, most notably, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits), it is perhaps not a surprise to find Ridley Scott champing at the bit to tackle the subject for himself. Here is a filmmaker who has spent much of his career making films that tell big stories on the largest canvases imaginable, many of which have contained some of the most alternately stirring, brutal and intricately choreographed battle scenes seen in modern cinema. Throw in the fact that he began his feature filmmaking career with The Duelists, a project itself set in the Napoleonic era, and he seems like perhaps the only filmmaker working today who could possibly handle such a project. Unfortunately, while watching his take on Napoleon, you get the sense that he didn’t really have much to say on the subject after and that his primary objective for tackling such a project was so that he could tell people that he accomplished something that even Kubrick couldn’t pull off. As a result, his film is little more than a string of massive battle scenes hooked together by a romantic drama that never quite clicks and a central performance by Joaquin Phoenix that is so odd that may have you reconsidering those aforementioned turns by Brando and Steiger.
As the film opens, the French Revolution is in full swing—we do get to see Marie Antoinette’s date with the guillotine in all its gory glory—but has created a power vacuum that Napoleon, a French officer who is dismissed by many for his unprepossessing stature and Corsican origins, decides that he is just the person to fill. He proves this when, as a 24-year-old major, he leads a stunning military victory at Toulon where his troops launch a sneak attack on the city, siege their cannons and use them against the Spanish and British ships sitting in the port. This sequence is undeniably impressive and shows Scott as a master choreographer of cinematic mayhem, which he continues to demonstrate over the course of the film, most notably during the striking sequence depicting the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon lures the opposing army onto a frozen lake and then sinks them in imagery that is both horrifying and strangely poetic. At these points, Napoleon is a work of epic beauty that is all the more impressive when you consider he is just about to turn 86, an age when most filmmakers have either outright retired or have elected to make projects that are somewhat less challenging.
The problem is that, perhaps like the man himself, Napoleon seems to have no idea of what it is trying to do when it is not on the battlefield. In these scenes, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa demonstrate no real interest of curiosity in Napoleon or what made him tick, either as a person or as a military tactician. Here, he is presented to us as a constantly muttering weirdo who has deep-seated mommy issues, problems with paranoia and is terrible in the sack—so much so, in fact, that it almost makes you wonder if it should be retitled Bonaparte is Afraid. At times, the film seems to be lurching towards comedy, thanks to some cheerfully absurd dialogue that crops up from time to time, including a line about a lamb chop that is surely destined for infamy. At times you get the sense that the film is trying to take the piss out of its central character by depicting him as a neurotic dweeb who only comes alive on the battlefield and who is a flop off of it—that is certainly the only thing that comes close to justifying the otherwise bewildering Phoenix performance, one that makes even the one offered by Dennis Hopper in the convulsively silly cut-rate historical travesty The Story of Mankind seem almost believable by comparison. To be fair, this might have made for an intriguing approach but the film never quite sticks to it in any consistent manner that suggests that Phoenix and Scott are seeing eye to eye on what they are hoping to accomplish regarding their take on the man and his myth, especially since the more subversive comedic bits are put in so haphazardly that when one comes up, such as that lamb chop line, it leaves you sitting there in the dark trying to determine if the laugh is meant to be intentional or not.
Even more flawed are the scenes that revolve around the relationship that develops when he meets and soon weds the widowed Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) in what appears at first to be a marriage of convenience for both sides—he desires a male heir and she wants security for herself and the children from her previous marriage, not to mention the cachet of being the wife of the most powerful man in France. Their union proves to be a tempestuous one that drives him to distraction for reasons ranging from his inability to give her a child to her extra-marital indiscretions while he is away, at one point risking his entire career when he abandons his troops to return home to confront her when he hears of one of her affairs. Alas, the relationship is sketched out in such a thin and unconvincing manner that it never takes hold in the manner that it should for it to work. This, I hasten to add, is not the fault of Kirby—she delivers a fine and measured performance that is the film’s chief non-battle-related asset, but she and Phoenix are playing on such wildly differing wavelengths in their scenes together that you never quite buy them as a couple, let alone one of the most famous couples in history.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Ridley Scott has released a misfired historical epic that combines stunning battle sequences with dramatic scenes that feel flat, unconvincing and oddly rushed—the same thing happened back in 2005 when he made his massive Crusades saga Kingdom of Heaven, only to be forced to cut his original 3 hour-plus version by about 45 minutes, a move that made a real mess out of the project. A couple of years later, however, he was given the chance to restore that missing footage into a full director’s cut that transformed one of his less convincing works into one of his great cinematic achievements. Considering the fact that Scott has already stated that a 4 hour-plus version of Napoleon is scheduled to appear on Apple TV in a few months, there is, I suppose, the possibility that the extra footage might indeed tackle the considerable issues of the theatrical cut and make for a more satisfying film in the end. (Of course, spending an extra 90 minutes with Phoenix’s peculiar turn might prove to be a deal maker for some.) However, in the current form that Scott and Sony Pictures are hoping that you will fork over good money to see, Napoleon is a weird and ungainly mess that combines moments of stunning action with a screenplay in dire need of a few more nails to help put it across.