★★

Entering the theater, a question occupied my mind: “what is Ridley Scott’s interest in Napoleon?”  While leaving the theater, as the casualty numbers flashed across the screen, it occurred to me that I’m not sure Scott was even interested in Napoleon at all.

Actually, I’m not sure Scott was interested in much of anything other than to simply get more practice with the $100M budget epic before Gladiator 2.  When he wasn’t illustrating the surface of the Red Planet, Scott’s filmography of the past decade reflects creative disinterest.  Scott himself all but admitted this with his characterizing of David in Alien: Covenant – the detached, emotionally void monologuing architect who talks to himself.

Scott’s films have suffered over the years in part for their lack of political daring.  His original international cut of Blade Runner is the most efficient, poignant, and moving version of that film in part because it is actually the most political version of the story.  If Deckard is just another Replicant, the story loses its meaning by gaining an answer to an unimportant question.  The actual story of Blade Runner was about the dehumanizing experience of hunting “the other,”  and the anxieties of creation and purpose.  Scott understood this in 1982, just as he understood in Gladiator that “win the crowd, and you will win your freedom” is as much a political statement as it is a sporting one.  Almost nothing in that movie actually happened in real life, but the reason Commodus fights Maximus at the end of that film is because neither emperors nor kings, nor even gods, get by for long without a roaring crowd.

Perhaps his only recent exception, The Last Duel echoed the same ethos.  It is the perfect subject of a class about editing for small details and how the angle of perspective, objects emphasized, order of sequences, and timing can affect not only the characters involved and their own perceptions of events and actions, but also the audience in how we see it.  Scott gives the moment no additional examination or scrutiny beyond merely accepting Marguerite’s account as “the Truth,” because by that point the political function of the duel takes a life of its own as an accepted solution even to the modern audience.  Scott clearly saw something in the popularity of the trials by combat in Game of Thrones, and took it seriously – enough to dare you not to admit that as much as we all enjoy a good ‘gotcha’ moment in a trial, it will rarely be as viscerally satisfying as a high-stakes fight in the ring.

I say all of this because Napoleon has, for worse and not better, almost none of these traces of creative daring.  Nor does it have any political awareness.  It is superficial and unsatisfying for its lack of character and urgency.

Imagine Patton where the Battle of El Guettar is replayed numbingly as a full-length sequence three times, where the slap and subsequent apology happen within two minutes total, and where his prayers and curses against God are taken out.  Now imagine that to restore the same length, added in is a melodrama about sexual insecurity and loneliness.  Patton leaned heavily to a fault on political context informed by the events of the war that the viewer needed to know, but it had real continuity even as it skipped over relevant events.  Napoleon does not, but it seems that some drunken misanthrope in the editing room thought that it did.  The audience here need only know that these conflicts are known generally as the Napoleonic Wars (plural), but nothing in the film gives them stakes or interest.

Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte looks unimportant in part because he was given almost nothing to work with.  He has one monologue about leadership failures in France.  Otherwise, he is a one-note performer in a two-note movie, lacking chemistry with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) except when they write to each other during the campaigns.  These are the only moments, aside from the visual splendor of the battles themselves, where the movie is interesting, and where any humanity penetrates the icy window Scott wraps around him.  But his face doesn’t suggest repression or even boyish eagerness.  It is almost programmed to merely look mildly irritated at all times as Phoenix’s Napoleon is re-written against the facts of history to have him prioritize the tactics of his spermicidal attack on Josephine’s uterus on par with all of his other wars.  As a result, even when there is an incredible looking ice battle sequence in the middle of the movie, Phoenix’s character never springs to life the way George C. Scott’s Patton did when he grinned from ear to ear and yelled, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

This kind of emotional blank stare by both the character himself and the filmmaker in depicting him doesn’t even make for an effective critique.  There are no small details to be found in the film to make what you see in front of you richer or interesting.  A cursory look at European history in this era might lead you to reasonably conclude that it was not just Napoleon who bore an inferiority complex, but rather all of France itself, having cursed itself with the specter of permanent revolution, terror, chaos, and political opportunism from 1789 onwards, when it sat sandwiched between powerful rivals who might look to capitalize on the spoils.  The most Napoleon ever says about that is in the beginning, as the character watches carnage as a bystander.

Napoleon Bonaparte and General Patton might have preferred to switch places in real life.  They were both brilliant battlefield commanders and military organizers who stayed at the front with their men, shared a similar disdain for Prussians, Russians, and Austrians, earned the repeated ire of the British, yet regarded civil politics as a mere contest of public thrills and cared far less about the idealistic goals of their civilian counterparts than they did about where the next enemy was.  Both were outsiders to the nation they served and especially to its military, and were ultimately rejected by both in the final chapter of their lives.  In watching Napoleon, it is clear that Scott has seen Patton, but knows that modern Oscar culture has no patience for a movie where a woman isn’t front and center on screen, and that there will be no chance of any interest by the Academy unless the man at the center exhibits impotent rage and delusion at least once.  This Napoleon is stuck in a movie that doesn’t care about him as much as momentarily musing about the number of people his wars killed at the end.

The art of cinema allows you to visualize victory and tragedy out of one life or death.  With Napoleon, Ridley Scott reduces the story of the first French Emperor to a bunch of empty statistics.

– Vivek