Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is baffling. From the get go, the miscasting of Joaquin Phoenix as the eponymous antihero is fatal. The actor looks every day of his fifty years, and yet he plays Napoleon from the age of 27, when he first made his mark on the bloody post-Revolution scene of a France in the throes of the Terror. Phoenix’s Napoleon mumbles unintelligibly throughout the film, and is as stripped of charisma as he is of energy, which flies in the face of the historical record of a dynamic leader who commanded the loyalty of his armies and the adulation of the masses of his countrymen. Scott’s Napoleon is a caricature, petulant, childish, boorish, besotted with Josephine and putty in her hands.
The historical Josephine was a few years older and more worldly than the young Bonaparte, whereas Vanessa Kirby, who plays her, is decades younger than Phoenix, which changes the whole dynamic of the onscreen relationship. Kirby does not seem to have a grip on her role, playing Josephine as mindlessly promiscuous, unfaithful, and alternately Napoleon’s muse and his victim. The sex scenes between them are so joyless and off putting that it is hard to believe in a grand passion.
I was particularly attentive to the brief scenes set during Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, having studied it extensively for my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter. There is no record of Bonaparte firing a cannon at the top of the Cheops Pyramid. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he left his army stranded in Egypt and escaped back to France because he heard that Josephine had taken a lover, rather than because, supremely ambitious as he was, he realized that his mission in Egypt had failed and history would pass him by while the real action was taking place on European soil.
Rupert Everett’s cameo as Napoleon’s nemesis the Duke of Wellington is equally one-note, a permanent curled lip of aristocratic disdain and an apocryphal sense of English fair play, a portrayal that reminds the viewer that Ridley Scott is an Englishman.
So, to sum up, why should a prospective viewer watch this two and a half hour film, but only on the widest possible screen in a theatre ? Because of the gorgeously reproduced landscapes of the battle scenes, familiar paintings come to life, history unfolding, Austerlitz, the march on Moscow. That is Ridley Scott’s forte. That is where we get a glimpse of the military genius behind the historic victories and the ultimately arrogant overreach of the Corsican who came from nothing and conquered Europe before he lost everything.
The closing credits enumerate the hundreds of thousands who died in battle in the Napoleonic wars. But if Scott’s intention is to condemn wars of ambition, why then are the battle scenes rendered so glamorously? Baffling.
