Posted on 12/13/2023 2:59:32 PM PST by Fiji Hill
Rising above the 7th Arrondissement of Paris is the gold dome of Les Invalides, a landmark that serves as both a French military museum and the final resting place of the nation’s greatest general, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The engravings surrounding his sarcophagus depict him as one of the ancients, adorned with laurels and togas next to tablets listing his vast accomplishments.
Napoleon’s legacy as both a military mastermind and a statesman is hard to summarize — and complicated to assess. Similarly, there’s just too much to the man to capture in a single film.
Still, the tagline of celebrated director Ridley Scott’s new “Napoleon” — released in theaters Nov. 22 — promises an ambitious attempt: “He came from nothing. He conquered everything.”
For better or worse, those words are where the film’s respect for Napoleon ends.
There is nothing of Napoleon’s rise from obscurity in Corsica to the top of the French Republic, nor mention of his early military victories. The years that he spent building the charisma and political capital to seize power as First Consul and eventually as the self-crowned emperor go unnoticed. Viewing “Napoleon” in a vacuum, one might wonder: How did France become an empire? And who even is this guy?
Instead, the Napoleon introduced to viewers (played by Joaquin Phoenix) is reduced to a simp for his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and, frankly, a bore.
The historical Napoleon is remembered for his energy, inquisitiveness, charm, and ability to micromanage the French Empire. But Scott’s Napoleon spends much of his screen time sitting forlornly on couches or behaving depravedly with Josephine, rather than leading his men in the throes of battle or engaging in geopolitical power plays with Russia, Austria, the Vatican, and his notorious adversary, Britain.
The director seems more inclined to show Phoenix’s Napoleon sleeping (for comedic effect) than doing anything interesting with his troops (apart from him passing out bread to several soldiers during the doomed Moscow campaign).
Scott’s strange inversions don’t stop there. While Napoleon has long been portrayed as a little man in stature (although in reality, he was average height for his day) but a big one in thought, will, and power, the on-screen version is the opposite.
After being told of Josephine’s affair while in Egypt, Napoleon returns to France to ragefully confront his wife. As a command, he warns that she is nothing without him. But it is a threat with no foundation, for this position of power is quickly reversed in the next scene with Josephine repeating the same words.
Josephine, we are made to understand, was truly the master of the relationship, while Napoleon was nothing more than a whimpering cuckold. It’s a notion that seems to drive the whole film: Napoleon was not really in command (this is even demonstrated when his cold, demanding mother convinces her sheepish son to have relations with a young woman to breed an heir for the empire).
By elevating Josephine as his prime motivation in several major events (including inaccurately suggesting she was the reason he left Elba during his first exile), Scott’s Napoleon is merely an angsty, boyish man.
His military maxims — ones that are still studied today — are also spurned. Beyond his strategizing for Waterloo, his greatest and last defeat that led to his second exile, Napoleon’s tact briefly shines forth during the Battle of Austerlitz, arguably his greatest victory; while cinematic, even Scott’s Austerlitz sequence rings hollow because it disregards the historical truth (and the French Army’s battleplan) for the myth — that thousands died as Napoleon’s artillery fired at the ice underneath the retreating Austrian and Russian troops.
In truth, only a dozen bodies have been found. But the myth masks the traps Napoleon laid; even in his greatest victory, the general cannot “win the day” in Scott’s “Napoleon.” Napoleon’s war victories — the most of any leader in history — are all enshrined on the tablets in Les Invalides but omitted in the film.
Scott seems uninterested in compensating for such omissions with other aspects of history. For example: The French Revolution and the Enlightenment, two other historical realities that are crucial to understanding what “made” Napoleon, appear nowhere in the movie.
Ultimately, his love and friendship with Josephine are not enough to present “Napoleon’s” portrait of its main subject as flesh and blood.
Les Invalides’ monuments are not flesh and blood either, but they convey a sense of the man’s standing in history. But “Napoleon” leaves us wondering why this man is even worth remembering at all. The film does not wrestle with his legacy, criticize his mythic stature, or explore what made him tick beyond sexual desires and dynastic aspirations. There is only one moment on St. Helena when the famed general — who, at this point, has lost everything he loved, including Josephine — purports a false narrative of himself that is easily debunked by two young girls.
The scene, however, is not enough to counter Napoleon’s self-aggrandizement and mitigating responsibility for blunders in his memoirs (which the film also fails to portray). “Napoleon” shortchanges its protagonist in too many respects to the point where the film’s tagline is meaningless, baseless like the character’s command to his wife. By the end, the viewer does not know where he came from, what he conquered, and how he should be regarded today.
The lifeless and hollow Napoleon of Scott’s film would be unworthy of a shrine in Paris that more than 1 million tourists visit per year — or, perhaps, even a movie more than 200 years after his death.
Scott should have directed a dramatic miniseries with relative unknowns.
Or selected a chapter in his life where both are protaganists in their rise to power.
As it is, it’s a sprawling and aimless movie. Everyone in that movie has made or been in far better ones. Scott made The Duelists, so you know he can tell a tight story set during the Napolenic Wars.
Its got some glorious moments in set pieces, but not a lot.
My vote for the best “painting” scene. They even pan out to show Jacques-Louis David sketching it.
The battles themselves are not, er, ideally done. They aren’t going to compete with Bondarchuk in any way. In some moments they are silly, as when Napoleon joins his cavalry in a charge.
Its certainly not “tight”. Its fair to say Scott bit off more than he could chew.
I mean the coronation is the best “painting” scene.
Napoleon should have been played by a younger man, IMHO. Easier to make a young man old than the other way.
The seen with the mummy is obliquely referenced/repeated in the scene where Napoleon dies on St. Helena.
In this case, IMHO, a very great deal of what was in this certainly belonged there, if it was to be a study of a character. There was way too much in there as it was, however, and a vast range of things had to be left out or mentioned in passing.
Napoleon was a scoundrel. Swept to power by a movement made to end monarchies, he made himself a monarch. Later he abandoned the defeated Grande Armee to freeze in the Russian wastes, while he was chauffeured swiftly back to Paris in his fancy coach.
The British eventually poisoned him, of course. And years later, somehow Napoleon III was given a particularly skittish horse to ride while out with a small British patrol in Natal. The rest of the party escaped. His horse escaped. He didn’t.
That’s right. I said Napoleon was “sprawling and aimless.” The Duelists, which was one of his first movies, was tight.
We are all losers, in the end.
What matters is what did we leave behind, for better or worse. In Napoleons case (the real, historical one), he changed Europe, and the world, in profound ways, for better AND worse.
You get a hint of both in literature, rec. the “Red and the Black” and “Charterhouse of Parma”, Stendhal, for what he meant just shortly after his passing. If you want a straight analysis, Napoleon is a theme running in background throughout Paul Johnsons “The Birth of the Modern”.
That is one criticism I’ve heard: trying to put too much into it. And as a result, there was not enough focus on any one thing. For myself, I’m more interested in the official history of Napolean than in his personal life. I wish there would have been more of that.
There was no ahistorical woke in this one that I could see. Josephine was what she was, and IMHO quite well written in this. This is no feminist screed.
There was one black guy acting as one of Napoleons generals in a few scenes. There was an actual black guy among Naps Generals, Gen Dumas (yes, the daddy of Alexandre “Three Musketeers” Dumas). He did have a substantial role as a Napoleon partisan in his rise to power, so legit. There were also a couple of mulatto servants of Josephine’s, which is also fair, as she was from Martinique.
“And years later, somehow Napoleon III was given a particularly skittish horse to ride while out with a small British patrol in Natal. The rest of the party escaped. His horse escaped. He didn’t.”
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Napoleon III died in his bed while in exile in Chislehurst, Kent, England on January 9, 1873. His son was killed while in the British Army fighting the Zulus in 1879.
The son of Napoleon III you mean, the Prince Imperial. He and his mother Eugenie were living in exile in Britain. The young fellow insisted on being a war tourist for his own reasons.
That is a genuine conspiracy theory about the horse. There is way too much randomness in that incident to ascribe a plot.
A pity that Stanley Kubrick never got to make his version of Napoleon.
I remember in the past critics ripping up movies. Fifty years later those movies are still hits on TV and the critics are long forgotten.
Ask again in 30 years and we will see.
The only big name I trust is Tom Cruise. He's using the same formula and it's still working. He seems to be immune to the woke virus (in making decent movies).
The eight hour long War and Peace (1966) is well worth the it as is WATERLOO (1970). got them on DVD.
I wanted to see this NAPOLEON movie at the theater (first time in 13 years) but I am too old to go out at nights. I did watch the 1927 version of NAPOLEON and will wait for the DVD.
Also watched IS PARIS BURNING?(1966) when the nazis rig the grave to be blown up. Then one of them looks at Napoleon’s victories and stops at the word....”MOSCOW,(sigh) Moscow!”
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