Paris, Oct. 16, 1793. Marie Antoinette walks through a jeering crowd to the guillotine, her head held high and her jaw set. Despite the rotting food splattered across her body, she has a commanding presence, a sense of dignity that sets her apart from the roaring mob around her. Somewhere within that mob stands a then-unknown Napoleon Bonaparte. His head is held just as high as the former queen’s, a faint look of disinterested disgust crossing his face as he surveys the crowd. He fancies himself above the fray.
This is how Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” begins, with one monarch falling and another just beginning to rise. From start to finish, the film pits Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) against the women in his life, particularly purporting to investigate his relationship with his first wife, the Empress Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). Unfortunately – despite its protestations to the contrary – “Napoleon” has very little interest in the woman who was so important to its subject, her name was his last word.
From a technical standpoint, “Napoleon” is as impressive as you might expect. The onslaught of violence contained within every battle scene, the sheer magnitude of war itself, is certainly well within Scott’s wheelhouse as a director. But the gray, almost monochromatic tone that colors those battle sequences – and the rest of the film, for that matter – is just as unrelenting, and serves as a harbinger for Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa’s sometimes funny, but overall flat take on the French leader.
The film is at its best and funniest when it focuses on Napoleon the man as opposed to Napoleon the general, and even better when it focuses on his marriage to Joséphine. However, the film never lends enough time to Joséphine’s role in the partnership to offer a compelling take on one of the more interesting marriages in history.
Even during the battle scenes themselves, as awe-inspiring as they might be, Napoleon himself is still the most interesting point of focus. During the Siege of Toulon, the battle that would first win him notoriety, he’s fidgety atop his horse in the moments before the bloodshed begins. Like a child who can’t seem to sit still, he mutters continuously to himself before choppily throwing his arm down like an ax, giving his men the signal to attack. But as his confidence on the battlefield grows, that space becomes less propulsive. By the time we get to Waterloo (where Napoleon’s loss was forever immortalized by ABBA), he doesn’t even need the arm to signal anymore – a tight nod will do.
Napoleon may have been a force on the battlefield (up to a point), but Scarpa’s script renders him an arrogant, blundering child on the homefront, stuck in a political era in France where everything was equally as blundering and ugly. Early on in the film, the controversial French leader Maximillien Robespierre (Sam Troughton) shoots himself in the jaw in the middle of a government building to avoid a coup and execution (the real Robespierre was wounded in the jaw when he was arrested, but it’s unknown if the injury was self-inflicted). Later on, Napoleon screams the words, “You think you’re SO great because you have BOATS!” at a British messenger before stomping back to his room like an angsty teenager. In moments like these, the film effectively skewers the idiocy and hubris of the men in charge, transforming into a dark, deadpan comedy as Napoleon seeks power along with the approval of the women in his life – notably, Joséphine.
Napoleon’s letters to Joséphine read like those of a petulant child, filled with jealousy and insecurity in spades. This seems to be Scott and Scarpa’s take on the Frenchman, that one of the ostensibly most fascinating figures in the history of the world wasn’t all that complicated. Napoleon was just another power hungry, pompous doofus in need of constant validation – the kind of validation that he received constantly on the battlefield, but could never really get at home.
While this makes for some funny moments, it’s not exactly very interesting. It’s nice to see Phoenix play up his comedic chops – something he doesn’t get to do often – but spending this much time with a main character this dense can grow tiresome. The film spends so much time telling us, rather than showing us, how integral Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine was for him. But what’s not clear are Joséphine’s thoughts on the matter.
Even as the film professes to be about marriage, Joséphine only comes across as interpreted through Napoleon. Through that lens, she ranges from haughty (“What is this costume you have on,” she smirks to him the first time they meet), to bored by his lack of prowess in the bedroom, to loving in her many letters. But, beyond the advantage a marriage of this sort lends to her, it’s unclear how Joséphine, from her own point of view, feels about how this partnership affected her life. Kirby is an intriguing performer, but without much to lean on, the enigma of Joséphine falls flat. It takes two to tango, and “Napoleon” often leaves Phoenix dancing on his own.
