Review: Napoleon (2023)

Director:  Ridley Scott

Stars:  Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Rupert Everett

You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get with Ridley Scott. He has several different modes, from dryly serious to (all too rarely) wickedly camp. And, sometimes, one mode can infer the other. Last time we saw him, two years ago, he offered up both modes. The Last Duel and House of Gucci were released within months of each other. Both of these (very different) historical dramas took place in Europe. How to receive the films seemingly came down to whether his mostly American and English actors were asked to attempt accents. The Last Duel dispensed with the need and scanned as a serious drama. House of Gucci wholeheartedly went the other way.

And now, Napoleon. With 61 battles to his name and a not-uneventful life away from these military skirmishes, any biopic of the notorious French Emperor is likely to play ambitiously. Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic Napoleon ran for 330 minutes, and was purportedly one of six films planned to cover everything. The other five never made it to fruition. With these figures in mind, Scott’s theatrical cut of 158 minutes seems positively trim. And you only need to check the trailers to confirm, yup, no accents. This one’s a dryly serious one then,  lads. Buckle in.

Except – as with elements of The Last Duel (Ben Affleck) – Scott has smudged the ink in the ledger. Palette, music and sweeping cinematography all scan as serious. A washed out, pristine military epic. But striding through them is an inscrutable Joaquin Phoenix as the man himself. His initial scenes seem unremarkable, even underplayed. Napoleon as depicted here is studious, tight-lipped, without humour. But as the picture progresses, as he ascends the ranks, and chiefly as he interacts with Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine de Beauharnais, this conservative rendering warps into something randy and satirical.

The sexually driven interplay between Napoleon and Joséphine is the crux of the picture, with jaw-dropping battle scenes decked around it. The film’s post-script takes pains to point out that her name was the last word that passed his lips. Kirby’s performance of her brings back Lady Gaga in House of Gucci as Patrizia Reggiani, albeit shorn of the Muppets Take Milan giddiness. That is to say Joséphine is presented as ambitious, passionate, and no fool. Napoleon is immediately her sucker, and their interplay brings out in Phoenix some of the film’s great delights, revealing the military tactician as a closet manbaby, horny and subservient to the woman who has conquered him. Indeed, David Scarpa’s screenplay draws a literal parallel between her eventual death and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Power behind the throne, indeed.

Stanley Kubrick was famously trying to bring an epic depiction of Napoleon’s life to the screen for many, many years, never managing to do so. Kubrick is remembered for his coldness mostly, but this often ignores an almost adolescent fixation with broad sex comedy that peppers his work, most iconically rendered in the shot of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange reaching up, mesmerised by a pair of heavenly boobs. Scott’s Napoleon carries a very similar sensibility. It is raunchy, phallic (all those canons!), and deeply suggestive that Napoleon’s maniacal quest for power was compensatory, directly driven by his inability to father a child with Joséphine.

With Kubrick on the brain, Napoleon inevitably draws comparison to Barry Lyndon (which has its own cheeky asides), especially whenever it comes to Scott’s staging of European and Russian armies squaring up to one another. These sequences are marvelous. Among the most impressive of Scott’s career, besting all prior efforts at such levels of spectacle. The pacing and geography is assured; the battles unfold like stories and are unique from one another. But they don’t feel as though they are in conversation with the other parts of the film. Perhaps for its cliff-noting, Napoleon can’t help but feel patchwork. A longer, 4-hour cut is promised, with an eye to a release on AppleTV in the new year. I’d be very interested to see how it plays in comparison.

What we have in this version is study, sometimes surprising, but oddly ill-fitting. Much is being made of the more overtly quirky choices made by Phoenix, mostly in scenes with Kirby. These are a joy. One almost wishes there was more consistency elsewhere. Scott’s position of mocking the man for his grotesque ego and bloodlust is clear (the final shot is among Scott’s best and funniest), but a vast majority of Napoleon still plays quite dryly, making one wish for a more gutsy swing for the fences. The lurid, callous Scott of Hannibal or Alien Covenant appears only sporadically here. Considering the subject, a little more indulgence might’ve been just right.

Still, what we get is squarely in the Good Ridley Scott camp, and you can stick Napoleon safely in the top third of his work. The octogenarian’s work ethic is… intimidating, and its quite easy to see Ridley himself as Napoleonesque (especially considering the brazen, self-aware arrogance of this movie’s press tour). I just wish that had translated a little more fully in the finished film.