If Ridley Scott were to live long enough (He is presently 86 years of age), we were bound to get a Napoleon movie. He has three loves. Dystopic Science Fiction, Strong Female Leads, and Historical Drama. The historical dramas (Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel) are what we are going to miss the most about him. Not that these are his best films but because no-one else in the movie business makes them. Or at least no-one who has the goodwill and box office clout to make them with the type of big budget production that they require.
Napoleon Bonaparte is a towering historical figure. I read Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, which told the story of the West in eleven volumes and took the author and his wife their entire lives to write. The Quarter Century of the French Revolution and Napoleon took up the entirety of the last volume. As Durant would say, it was a time of compressed history. More happened in that 25 years than usually happens in 100. Ridley Scott brings to this task his usual diligence and competence. The directing is sure, the camera frame doesn’t spare the details, and the production value spares no expense. Cast as Napoleon is Joaquin Phoenix, who seems to have ripened into the go-to actor for complicated characters (He has played both Jesus and The Joker in the past five years). Not that his performance here is all that complicated. Because of the dichotomy between glorious victories in battle and dismal performance in the bedroom, Phoenix’s performance is part entitlement and part impotence, which more remembers than dispels all the satirizations of Napoleon as a very short and very temperamental man. A memorable line herein is, “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop.”
The problem with this mediocre movie is the same one that plagues almost all biopics. It’s a problem of scope. For Napoleon, this is a larger problem than most historical figures. There is a tendency to want to include everything notable that the title character has been involved in. However, when the title character has been in so much, what you get is an abridged version of a life, and the more that is cut out, the less what remains can hold together the plot.
Here are the items that this movie concerns itself with: Napoleon’s famous battles including Toulonne, Egypt, Austerlitz, the Russian Campaign. (Try as the movie might to be comprehensive, we don’t get Napoleon crossing the alps in the Italian campaign.) The other half (half!) of the plot is about Napoleon's romantic relationship with Josephine. What doesn’t make the cut is the revolutions in political science, the revolutions in science (the meter system anyone?), the liberation of the European Jew, the French breakup and reconciliation with the Catholic Church, the global naval wars and the list goes on and on. In a way, this movie is a really good example of how Hollywood bastardizes history. There was only so much run time in this movie and what was prioritized in Napoleon’s life was the sex and violence.
To witness how this common problem can be avoided, one can watch Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln which decided to not tell the story of Lincoln’s life but to focus on a six month period where Lincoln set out and succeeded in passing the 13th Amendment through the U.S. Congress. Because that movie constrained the time period, it didn’t have some obvious problems in character development that this one has. For one thing, characters that are introduced in the first half hour of the Lincoln movie still exist in the plot at the end of it. In Napoleon, all the characters besides Napoleon and Josephine that have roles in the first half, don’t make it to the second half. One of the biggest characters, Napoleon’s competing general at Waterloo, Lord Wellington, literally shows up in the last hour. If you didn’t already know the general arc of history of this movie, it might be a bewildering journey through random names and places. And if you do know the general background, you will notice details that are brought up but not really developed. Robespierre really did try to shoot himself but failed. It was dramatic when it happened I’m sure, but it is hardly dramatic when the movie shows it. How could it be, when Robespierre is hardly introduced before he exits stage left. Can you really pick up from watching this movie why it was such a disastrous move by Napoleon to invade Russian and then to hang around in Moscow for so long. The sequence must be about 10-15 minutes at most in this movie.
But really, the worst part of telling this story fast-forward and only focusing on the battles and the love relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is that it inevitably draws connections that almost certainly are not there. Napoleon didn’t abandon his army early in Egypt because he missed Josephine and was worried that she was cheating on him (she was). He didn’t decide to reclaim his throne after his first exile in Elba because he read about Josephine dancing the waltz with the Russian emperor in the newspaper. That’s crazy. It makes sense to try to draw that connection dramatically in this story because otherwise the two halves of the plot would have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But come one, just do less and you’ll make a better movie. I wonder what this story would feel like if Sofia Coppola told the story entirely from the point of Josephine. Now that is not too much plot for a movie. Imagine a story about Napoleon without battles. Wouldn’t that be interesting.
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