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Napoleon, director Ridley Scott‘s 28th feature film (and counting), is not so much an Oscar-baiting historical epic as it is a grand farce about a small man. While it is being marketed with battleground-heavy trailers scored to Black Sabbath and earmarked as Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix‘s latest tour de force, Napoleon is actually a film that undercuts the titular emperor at every turn. He’s a terrible lover, awkward politician, and bizarrely genius fool. Napoleon is a film full of bleakly comic juxtaposition and absurd soundtrack choices, and a portrait of ambition that makes greatness feel like the worst thing a person to aspire to. While it’s not on the same level as some of Scott’s other all-time greats, Napoleon is nonetheless an intriguing experiment in storytelling.
Napoleon initially presents itself as a straight-forward biopic, but there are clues from the start that Scott is toying with the audience’s perspective. The director’s own viral retort to historians fact-checking his film aside, Napoleon flits through major historical events, conflating the start of the French Revolution with the eventual execution of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) and skipping petty details like Napoleon Bonaparte’s (Joaquin Phoenix) backstory. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa are assembling a portrait of Bonaparte that is more vibes than history lesson and the vibes are hilariously all over the place — and purposely so.
Our first introduction to Napoleon is at Marie Antoinette’s aforementioned execution. While the queen huddles in terror with her children behind the closed doors of Versailles, she faces the jeering crowd calling for her death with a queen’s snobbery. Her disdain for the French people is so palpable that it takes multiple tries to get the Austrian-born noblewoman to bow low enough to fit under the guillotine’s sharp blade. The only person in sight rolling their eyes more at the mucky cabbage being thrown? The ambitious young artillery officer named Napoleon. Their shared disdain for the French mob is only the first thing to link the dead queen and future emperor.
We then watch as Napoleon quickly asserts himself as a genius tactician on the battlefield, not only using his enemies’ perceived strengths against them, but that of his French fraternal brethren jockeying for supreme control in the chaotic, violent, gaping void left in the wake of the Revolution. (It’s not that he’s ambitious for power; he just loves France, okay? He doesn’t ever start wars, you know? He’s just trying to maintain peace at all costs!) Napoleon’s talent is twofold. He not only understands how to best use emerging technology like canons to his advantage, but he also doesn’t shy away from tactics that get his hands dirty. It makes him a brute and eventually an emperor.
There’s only one person in the world who can defeat Napoleon: his future wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). Instead of portraying their marriage as a paradigm of true, passionate love, Napoleon subverts the imperial couple’s relationship at every turn. Joséphine, a literal survivor of the Reign of Terror, initially just deigns to be with the coarsely-mannered Corsican. To underscore the bizarre juxtaposition of what their romance should be versus what it is, Scott boldly cribs Dario Marinelli’s Oscar-nominated Pride & Prejudice (2005) score for their early, emotionally intimate moments.
Although Joséphine cops to having a sordid sexual history and seduces him using the tricks of a courtesan, Napoleon continually fails to inspire her more carnal desires. The sex scenes in Napoleon are farcical, showing the great man of history as a rutting loser making barnyard animal noises when he’s aroused and failing to ever make his lady orgasm. The one time Joséphine excitedly rushes to bed? When his successful coup brings her into one of the regal bedrooms at Versailles. She is happiest when she is most powerful.
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Ridley Scott doesn’t celebrate Napoleon and his accomplishments so much as he strips the legend down to a pathetically human size. At times, Phoenix plays Napoleon like a loser, struggling towards the end to mount a warhorse and moaning over and over again about how much he needs Joséphine. He knows he’s a genius on the field of battle, but his insecurities are such that they lead him to eventual ruin, whether it’s in taking the young Tsar Alexander I’s (Édouard Philipponnat) bait to launch a winter campaign in Russia or in allowing the slippery Tallyrand (Paul Rhys) to convince him to become a vainglorious monarch. Once Napoleon becomes Emperor, sure, he’s got a few years in the sun — including a masterful victory at Austerlitz (the film’s greatest battle sequence) — but viewers know that the days of his reign are numbered.
“If Ridley Scott’s aim is to make a mockery of Napoleon Bonaparte, then Joaquin Phoenix is 100% in on the joke.”
If Ridley Scott’s aim is to make a mockery of Napoleon Bonaparte, then Joaquin Phoenix is 100% in on the joke. Instead of using a British accent, he clings to his natural American twang, helping to further underline Napoleon’s outsider status. It’s not just that the soldier-turned-tyrant is mentally on another wavelength when it comes to battlefield tactics, but he also doesn’t understand social cues, offering countless comic moments that jut against the serious tone of an historic epic. “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!” he cries when Joséphine knocks his weight gain at dinner. Destiny, he later writes to his wife, is also bringing him to victory in Russia. (History nerds will immediately know that’s the far more hilarious joke.)
Once again, if there’s one character in the film who sees Napoleon for the fool he is, the insecure striver he conquers the world to hide, and the dangerous savage he has the capacity to be, it’s Joséphine. Ridley Scott has revealed that there is an even longer cut of his nearly three-hour-long film that focuses on Kirby’s character and I’m rather keen to see it. In this version, she is an enigma whose only aim is survival. Perhaps with more context for her actions, we can understand even more about her bewitching relationship with Bonaparte. As it is, Kirby is a slyly seductive presence, one who always seems to be holding on to more cards than she’s playing.
Napoleon is an expertly made period film, but it never gets bogged down by the fusty conventions of the genre. Rather than hold the audience’s hand through a history lesson, Ridley Scott uses his technical prowess to present a version of Bonaparte’s story that undermines the mythology. The battle scenes are epic, the performances are incredible, but the story might be a radical change from what audiences expect. It’s the inversion of expectations that I found most stunning. By showing the myriad foibles of this fabled ruler, Scott has ironically made a film about the idea of universal equality. In the end, we’re all just humans fighting for survival in a slippery pile of muck. That includes Napoleon.
Napoleon premieres in theaters on November 22 and will be streaming on Apple TV+ at a later date this year.
