It exhausts me to have to think about this film after watching it. It isn’t the longest film I have ever seen, and also doesn’t necessarily feel like the longest film I’ve ever seen, but every second of it is so packed with stuff that it feels like a weird savoury old milkshake. Apple TV want to do nothing but give prestige directors a lot of money to make giant films about history. Ridley Scott is no exception to that, being given a reported $200 million to travel around the world with his friend Joaquin Phoenix.
Ridley Scott has had a personally shaky track record with me, connecting to some of his films, and being unshakably bored for others. Napoleon falls right in the middle of that with big and loud battles blended with a little pathetic Napoleon.
Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) rises through the ranks of France by rallying against the falling monarchy. He appeals to the masses and takes the throne of France with his wife Josephine by his side. We are taken through his early adult life, as he builds these connections and makes these money moves. He’s climbing up the social ladder like a 2007 Serena Vanderwoodsen, complete with all the lies and backstabbing, although in Napoleon's case, some of it was lateral backstabbing.
We’re taken on a journey as he ventures off with thousands of French soldiers to conquer countries and fight for France’s supremacy. His accession to the throne and collection of power only breeds insecurity for him as he battles with the fears that Josephine is unfaithful to him. While he fights to gain another commonwealth, Josephine fights to stay faithful to her husband. His fears manifest as he hears word that she has taken a lover. In an initial fit of rage, he storms off the battlefield and all the way back home to confront her. After some convincing, they stay together until they hit a road block of bearing a son. Josephine’s infertility causes Napoleon to seek out children from another pond, impregnating someone else to have an heir to his lineage.
He then peaces out to continue being absent from his familial duties, to take on more and more, pushing his power to its limits, before his appointment as head of a small island owned by France after a Russian blunder.
The story itself spans all of Napoleon’s adult life, right up until his lonely death 1821, and portrays him as a wholly insecure and pathetic man, obsessed with power and proving himself to those around him. Joaquin Phoenix plays this so well, with the quietness of someone who fronts confidence but falters so much in their private life. He isn’t a loud and aggressive conqueror as the movie would suggest, instead he brings complexity to the character and a specific brand of social awkwardness that I feel like only I have been able to bring to conversations before this. Not to equate myself to Napoleon, I don’t have the tenacity to leave the country and rally the troops, but nice to know I could if I put my mind to it.
I struggle to identify if the social awkwardness is intentional or just bad writing, because the storyline is pretty locked down, with some slow pacing but overall a good flow to the narrative. The dialogue however, is absolutely manic and jumps from the most basic and to the point sentences to riddles of metaphors and name drops of people, places and things without the slightest sliver of context.
Even with this, the broad story is easy enough to follow without context. I do think it’s easy to get jumbled up with timelines and locations if you’re paying attention to the title cards that notify you of time passage.
No matter the time, Vanessa Kirby as Josephine was there and giving her all. I was fully on her side in every single conversation she had. She had such a strong presence around her, that made it seem like she earned every single second of screen time. She brought poise and self assurance to balance Napoleon, shifting the power hugely when we see him interact with Josephine in the home versus his interactions with his people during battles.
The technical side of the film uses all the budget it can to perfect the visuals of the environments they’re in, showcasing them in a completely boastful fashion. It felt like looking at an influencer’s holiday pictures, just basking in the beauty of the environments they’re in like they were born there. The space in each shot is used expertly to fill the screen or allow the space. No matter what time period or location we end up in, there’s always believability in the construction. Even in the famously historically inaccurate pyramid bombings.
These historical inaccuracies didn’t really take away from the story for me. I was just watching the time go by, unable to take all the events in. The film is dense with story yet pretty empty with much substance. The central relationship is developed enough to make me understand they’re dynamic, but not really care too much. We skid through time so fast to squeeze in his life and fit in as many big scale battles as possible. While they’re visually impressive, they do become a bit samey when you watch the twentieth cannon fire into the side of a wall or directly through a horse’s chest.
The film is a lot gorier than I thought it was going to be, with some pretty shocking displays of large-scale violence, really showing the disregard both Napoleon and his adversaries have for human life.
Napoleon is an epic biopic about a tiny little boy who wanted to steal the world. It doesn’t give you enough to feel for anyone around him, and doesn’t spend enough time in one place to allow you to get settled in anything they’re doing. We have a lot of moving parts in the film that get dropped as we breeze through time, leaving you to assume plot points get tied up from one time jump to another. I’ll revisit this film once I have settled in being an old man and hopefully will love every second.
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