Napoleon said, “I love power. But it is as an artist I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.” Ridley Scott is 86 and his power as a director is now truly in his imperial phase bankrolled by Apple Films. He isn’t getting older, he is getting better, a musician with a wicked sense of humour, joie de vivre that cascades and crescendos throughout his latest historical epic, Napoleon.
Whereas fellow octogenarian Martin Scorsese is looking to the end in recent interviews he gave as promotion for his excellent Killers of the Flower Moon, Scott is clearly having the time of his life. Napoleon is a brisk two and a half hours, a raucous romp, Kubrickian in its deadpan satire in places, Monty Pythonesque in its bawdy humour in others. Scott has thrown a complete curveball of style and tone, imagine a film scripted by William Makepeace Thackery and storyboarded by the caricaturist and printmaker James Gillray and you’ll get the idea.
In fact, the film that Napoleon is most reminiscent of is Terry Gillingham’s episodic comedy Time Bandits rather than Sergei Bondarchuk’s worthy but sometimes ponderous Waterloo.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as the titular Corsican, first as a young artillery officer, brave yet unsure at the Siege of Toulon, then at the peak of his powers in his masterful defeat of the Russian and Austrian forces at Austerlitz, manic and scornful at the end of his tempestuous relationship with Josephine, depressed during the retreat from Moscow and avuncular in exile after Waterloo. Phoenix’s Napoleon copulates like a Duracell Bunny and talks through the ages to Egyptian Pharaohs after The Battle of the Pyramids. His is an arch performance rather than a grand one, beautifully insular, an awkward genius glamoured by the courtesan and sometime Empress Josephine.
Vanessa Kirby as Josephine is electrifying. When we first see her, she looks like Pris from Scott’s masterpiece, Bladerunner or perhaps Scott envisaged Pris as Josephine to Roy Batty’s Napoleon all along. Kirby’s Josephine observes everything with a cold, detached air, a raised eyebrow strikes like a sabre, a snigger curdled with tears reveals everything and nothing; she is mercury in human form, cruelly loyal to her Emperor and wedded to her desires for younger men. Napoleon wrote thousands of love letters to Josephine, but Kirby’s Josephine is supremely unsentimental, a survivor, hitching to his baggage train to outpace the pursuing hordes.
Paradoxically, Napoleon’s life seems too gigantic for cinema, but prestige television is way too slight to grapple with his grandeur. Scott decides to go for broke and gallop at pace between the great moments in Napoleonic history. Therefore, we lose a host of superb character actors to posterity, and with them Napoleon’s key relationships with his Marshals, notably Ney and Davout, Paul Barras vanishes before our eyes and his brother Lucien flits in and out of the story like a pair of semaphore flags.
Notorious for Director’s cuts of his movies, Scott has teased a four-hour version to be released on Apple TV+, no doubt extending the battle scenes and restoring key characters to their pomp and finery.
Whether the four-hour version will be superior or not is almost a moot point. Scott’s cinematic achievement with Napoleon not only bookends his career by making a companion piece to his glorious debut The Duellists set amongst the backdrop of Napoleon’s rise and fall, but as a metaphor for Scott’s own career as a self-made man from humble beginnings who didn’t suffer fools gladly. It’s worth remembering that Scott, alongside Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, changed Hollywood filmmaking forever coming from their background in British advertising. Scott works fast and was used to telling a complete story in 30 seconds whilst shooting it like a painting in the Grand Manner and for Napoleon this unrelenting pace is what makes it such an exhilarating experience.
If you want historical accuracy, if you want to learn about Napoleon as a mathematical and bureaucratical genius, use Napoleon as a gateway to read Napoleon: A Biography by Frank McLynn, or Robert Aspen’s twin volumes, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. If you want cinema at its purest, most glorious, most outrageous form, saddle up, put your boots in the stirrups and charge with the Grand Armee.
As Scott answered his critics, “When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then’.”