Vigorously made, but still feeling creakily of another, older filmmaking era, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon offers a bit more than grimy, glory-of-battle bluster by structuring much of its narrative around the anguished letters that Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his wife Josephine. Heard in voiceover, these missives counter the perception of Napoleon as a mighty conqueror by painting him as a needy, naive, besotted cuckold. Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman) brings a fitting forcefulness to the part of Josephine, an ardent survivor of the French revolution who has learned how to win her own skirmishes on other battlefields—namely, salons and bedrooms. As Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix undermines his character’s lofty historical stature at nearly every turn, from his panicked breathing just before an early career battle to the coup de pratfall he conducts later on to his occasional, anachronistic asides. (“You think you’re so great because you have boats!” he tells a British dignitary.) It’s amusing, in a Barry Lyndon sort of way, but also feels a bit blinkered. Discounting Napoleon Bonaparte as a buffoon who merely benefitted from societal chaos does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he left dead.
(11/18/2023)
