Napoleon: A romp of a biopic
Review Overview
Cast
8Carnage
8Ivan Radford | On 01, Mar 2024
Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby
Certificate: 15
History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors. In the case of Napoleon, a great winner then a great loser, he wrote his own history so extravagantly that everyone has written about him since. Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s 2-and-a-half-hour epic, takes a howitzer to that history with a boisterous energy that’s worthy of Bonaparte himself.
Accuracy isn’t the name of the game here. Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa seem less interested in being 100% faithful to what happened and more interested in deconstructing a myth that started with Napoleon’s own propaganda and has been filtered through layers of conflict, caricature and – yes – cinema. If you’re hoping for something to rival Abel Gance’s 1927 silent masterpiece, you might be disappointed. If you’re hoping for a film in which Joaquin Phoenix fires a cannon at a pyramid, this is for you.
The film picks up with the French Revolution, which sees Napoleon (Phoenix) seize the opportunity to start climbing the ladder of authority – and a key siege of the British-controlled port of Toulon in 1793 establishes him as a formidable military strategist. Supported by his friend, Barras (the always-excellent Tahar Rahim), and his brother, Lucien (Matthew Needham), he rises through the ranks to become General. Was he a scheming tyrant? A Corsican ruffian? A comical outsider? A battlefield genius? Yes, says Scott, and much more – and also much less.
Over 150 minutes, we get a whistle-stop tour of Napoleon’s rise and fall – from his campaign across Europe and Egypt, his taking of a deserted Moscow and ultimate defeat in Russia, to his exile to the island of St Helena. It’s boldly streamlined and wildly inconsistent in academic details, but it’s an engrossing and entertaining study of a character who, more than a 100 years later, could never be anything but larger than life.
Joaquin Phoenix is wonderfully weird in the title role, lurching from ambitious and audacious to petulant and jealous, not to mention clever, determined, cruel and forceful. He preens, he broods, he scowls and he pouts in a way that someone attempting to appoint themselves president today would – it’s an intense, towering portrait of a dictator that isn’t afraid to bring him down to size.
Key to that, the script proposes, is seeing him through the lens of his relationship with Joséphine. A widower when they first meet in 1795, she’s six years his senior – and Vanessa Kirby (14 years Phoenix’s junior) is sensational enough to help us get past that dubious casting age gap.
“Without me, you’re nothing,” she tells him in one of their many heated exchanges, as she exerts an authority over him that starts with her sexuality. She’s at once a prototypical trophy wife and a calculating force in her own right, and has a crackling anti-chemistry with Phoenix that charges their marriage with a toxic devotion. Their bond is driven by manipulation, infidelity, needy desperation – and, on some level, a sincere (and twisted) affection. “I’m above petty insecurity,” he tells her, after returning home fuelled by jealous anger. They both know he’s lying, even as they both seem to want to believe it. And the brief glimpses we get of Napoleon and his mother only reinforce that suspicion.
Scott stages their relationship with a volatility that’s sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking and sometimes funny – and that occasional darkly comic streak is a key driver of the film’s tone. Because, for all its unwieldy running time, Napoleon is a rollicking ride. That’s partly thanks to Scott’s unrivalled ability to put together an action sequence, and the skirmishes we witness are often jaw-dropping. The early siege is a violent rush with an immediacy that runs through to the frosty brutality of the battle of Austerlitz, and the close-up carnage is contrasted effectively with stunning aerial shots that give us a general eye’s view of the precise tactics and formations.
The result plays with perceptions and reputations of Napoleon as fast and loose as it does with facts. Propulsively charging through the pages of history, Scott and Scarpa emerge as the victors – and the spoils of their campaign is an absolute romp.
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This review was originally published in January 2024.