Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 38 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: David Scarpa
Quick Impressions:
I’ve been so excited to see this movie, for one reason and one reason only. In the trailer, we see a lot of Napoleon in Egypt, and for twenty-six years, I’ve delighted in a long-standing running joke about that.
My first semester of college, my roommate’s little sister came to visit. We were all sitting around playing some variation of Twenty Questions. We were trying to think of a person.
I asked, “Is he Egyptian?”
She replied, “Sort of.”
The game continued for half an hour.
The answer was Napoleon!
At the time, this was hysterically funny to all of us, but watching the movie Tuesday night, I thought, “Yeah, you know, Napoleon is sort of Egyptian. Cathy was right all along!”
The other thing I know about him (other than that he’s sort of Egyptian) is that he tried to invade Russia in the winter in a catastrophic blunder. That is well represented here, though pretty much everything in the movie takes a backseat to his big romance with Josephine.
We had a full house for Thanksgiving. I was ridiculously excited for a girls’ night out to see Napoleon with my sister and my daughter. (That may seem like a weird choice for a girls’ night out, but my sister’s a history teacher and a Joaquin Phoenix fan.)
We weren’t quite sure what to make of the movie. My sister’s take was, “This is clearly supposed to show the stupidity of war like this, where rich, entitled people go around making armies fight.”
Trigger warning before I go on: Very early, there’s a shot of a horse being horribly blown apart by a cannonball. This is so grizzly and left all of us perplexed. (Maybe calling it a “Trigger” warning seems insensitive to the horse, but that’s unintentional.)
“I thought we were gearing up for lots of graphic violence,” my sister said, “but then we didn’t really get that.”
“Maybe that was supposed to mirror his life,” my daughter suggested. “It seems violent and exciting at the beginning, and then it just kind of builds to anticlimax and ends.”
“Not with a bang, but a whimper,” I chimed in because I love excuses to quote “The Hollow Men.” (I say, “Not with a bang, but a whimper,” every chance I get. The other day at the park, my eight-year-old was like, “Why do you keep saying that?”)
It is odd that the film begins with something so unexpectedly grizzly. Napoleon reaches in and takes the cannon ball out. Perhaps there is a strange parallel here with another scene later in the film when Josephine tells Napoleon to look down for a surprise. “Once you see it, you will always want it.” Maybe the point is his two obsessions are war and Josephine.
At any rate, this is one of the more shocking moments I’ve seen on screen in a mainstream film recently simply because, of course, it’s horribly illegal to harm horses while making a movie. (I’m sure this is CGI, but it made me reflect that graphic violence in American movies disproportionately involves people, not animals.) If you’re put off by the idea of a horse blasted apart by a cannon, beware. But be aware, too, that this is pretty much the only instance of this kind of violence in the movie.
The Good:
Okay, I’ve been trying to write this review for three days. We were all so bewildered by Napoleon.
I’ll say this. If you’re looking for a war epic, you’re not going to like it.
It’s mostly about Napoleon’s (rather destructive) obsession with Josephine and his (perhaps less destructive) obsession with war.
Okay, the obsession with war is destructive, too. But I mean, it’s not Napoleon’s fault that Moscow burns (no matter what he tries to tell you)!
As someone who always kind of liked Commodus best in Gladiator, I enjoyed this unexpected angle. Well, let me clarify. I liked Phoenix’s performance as Commodus. Obviously, Commodus is a stone-cold creep. Phoenix’s Napoleon comes across as a little creepy, too. (At least, he’s not a brilliant conversationalist, and his lovemaking technique leaves a little something to be desired.)
“I expected him to act more like Napoleon,” my daughter remarked. “Instead he just seems like Joaquin Phoenix in a Napoleon costume.” My sister and I agreed that the performance is quite like that, but I’m not saying it doesn’t work. (I never met Napoleon. I find Phoenix believable in the role.)
I was surprised how much of the film focuses on the Josephine relationship. Prior to this, my go-to cinematic Napoleon reference was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Josephine’s not in that at all. So she gets way more screen time here.
Vanessa Kirby makes a captivating Josephine. (Quite literally, she makes Napoleon her emotional captive.) I’m thrilled to see Kirby in something besides Pieces of a Woman, a film that was too relentlessly harrowing and sad for me to enjoy. This performance is more fun. There’s a moment when she tells him, “If you look down, you will see a surprise. Once you see it, you will always want it.” That’s confidence! Of course, I suppose you need a line like that if you’re trying to pick up Napoleon!
I really can’t imagine saying to someone, “I will always have power over you.” That seems like a pretty unhealthy dynamic long-term, and, as we see in this movie, it is! It’s also a romantic fiction generated by Napoleon who has a penchant for playacting love. In the end, it’s quite clear that all his posturing notwithstanding, Napoleon is the one with the power in this relationship. So much of the film is devoted to their offbeat, dysfunctional dynamic. In the beginning, you almost feel sorry for Napoleon, but eventually you’re like, “Josephine! How long are you going to put up with this treatment?” Their marriage begins to seem somewhat torturous (though addictive) to them.
Maybe because I was expecting something similar to Gladiator, I did not expect the Napoleon/Josephine relationship to be the central, dominating force in this film. As I write that, I think, “Well that was kind of stupid, Sarah. In Gladiator, Maximus is constantly thinking about his wife, and Commodus is unendingly obsessed with his sister.”
Clearly, it’s my expectations that were out of line. The Josephine romance crowds out everything else in the story, but their tortured interactions are more entertaining and thought-provoking for me than endless battle scenes would be.
But it’s also fun to discover how Napoleon eventually loses to his opponents in battle. The way this movie presents it, a big part of Napoleon’s downfall is that he keeps fighting the same opponents over and over again. Every time he beats them, they learn his tactics. Eventually, they wise up. (This is why I’m terrible at chess when I play someone cold, but the longer I play an opponent, the more I win.) (It also helps that my most frequent opponent is an eight-year-old).
I know Napoleon is known for being a brilliant tactician (which I certainly am not), and he’s probably fabulous on the battlefield, but he’s not great with people. Unless I’m misunderstanding the movie, he makes the horrendous, glaring mistake of giving away his entire game plan to his enemy before he does it.
He has a meeting with Czar Alexander (Edouard Philipponnat) and somewhat bizarrely says, “Hey you know what would be so intimidating? We could all get a big army together and march on a city in a really intimidating way. That would really freak out our enemy.”
Then, in a move that utterly blindsides and dumbfounds Napoleon, Alexander turns on him. So then, of course, Napoleon does the exact kind of power move he has described to Alexander, and—shockingly—Alexander anticipates it and deflects it (with a theatrical flourish worthy of Napoleon himself).
I don’t think a brilliant tactician would handle this situation the way Napoleon does. The brilliant tactician in that exchange appears to be Alexander, though even he is not that brilliant. (I mean, what if Napoleon didn’t show up? Alexander’s move wouldn’t look so brilliant then!) No, Alexander’s not brilliant either. Perhaps Napoleon would be great at chess, but he doesn’t appear to be great with people. This is such a blunder, doubly embarrassing because Napoleon is so shocked and confused.
I wanted to yell at him, “Do better, Napoleon!” I’ll confess, I expected a bit more of ol’ Napoleon after hearing so much about his military prowess. What this movie mainly does is show us that he’s profoundly good at losing key battles. If the point of the movie is supposed to be that Napoleon kind of sucks, then it’s working beautifully. Otherwise, I’m not so sure it’s good, but I still enjoyed watching it.
And speaking of Napoleon losing key battles, I really liked Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington. He’s just quite charming in this, jolly good fun. He’s the clear standout among Napoleon’s enemies. He’s got as much charisma and personality as Napoleon himself. And I was surprised to see Ben Miles in the cast (as Caulaincourt). I always think of him as Patrick from Coupling and get excited when he turns up in movies.
Best Action Sequence:
Both my sister and my daughter enjoyed the battle on the ice, so I’ll defer to them. What jumps out to me is the early moment when the horse rips apart. But of course, that’s because I had a viscerally negative reaction to it.
The sex scenes are also quite memorable simply because…I mean…I don’t know…Words fail me. I would not want to be married to Napoleon.
Also, the way he rises to power by running insanely out of a room is something else.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene is when Moscow burns.
Best Scene Visually:
To me, the movie in miniature is the scene of the horse, the surprise from Josephine, and the burning of Moscow. Those all tie together for me thematically.
The Negatives:
I know Napoleon was supposed to be a great military mind, a brilliant tactician, but for me, that only comes across well in the end credits. We get an impressive listing of the death tolls of the numerous, significant battles in which he fought. But we don’t see too many of those battles on screen. What we mainly get in the movie is more like Napoleon: Quirky Moments Reel.
To me, most of Napoleon’s “brilliant strategy” seems like having a lot of resources and being in the right place at the right time. He’s not really a brilliant tactician. He comes across as paranoid and often socially inept, successful only because the French Army is behind him. That’s a shame because I find him more likeable than I expected back when I assumed this movie would be more about the staggering grandeur of sweeping battles. Phoenix plays him more like, “What if Commodus from Gladiator weren’t nearly so evil but was twice as weird and awkward?” which is engaging to watch. I’m hesitant to say it’s bad, but it’s just kind of baffling, honestly.
I’m sure the historic Napoleon couldn’t have been quite like the impression I get of him in this film. Here he’s a terrible lover who keeps ruining dinner by yelling at his wife for not being pregnant. He has strange fixations with mummies and keeps snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, increasingly incredulous at every decisive loss.
Now to be fair to the movie, I’ll say that I’ve heard there’s a much longer director’s cut, and sometimes a film looks really different when we have the opportunity to see the whole story. Directors’ cuts both make and destroy brilliant films. Also, my expectations may have been out of line because I didn’t go into this expecting Josephine to pull focus so much. (“I don’t think it’s being advertised like that,” said my daughter.) The other issue is that I’ve been sick and came to the film sleep-deprived and distracted. I’m having trouble focusing. So that may be on me, Ridley Scott.
The character I’d like to see fleshed out in a director’s cut is Napoleon’s mother. Josephine has some strange lines about how he’ll never be anything without her and his mother. Then his mother lays waste to their marriage. She only gets a couple of scenes. Who is this woman, and why does she wield such power over him? I mean, I know she’s his mother! I just wrote an entire novel inspired by my mother. But I’d still like more focus here.
I’ve been working on this review for a week. I still don’t know what I think about Napoleon. What can I say about it overall?
Overall:
I’m not sure I liked Napoleon. Of course, if he wrote about me, he probably wouldn’t like me, either. But more people would read his review. I mean, he’s Napoleon! (Just kidding I did like Napoleon, but it definitely subverted my expectations, and I don’t like writing this review.)