It’s a simple tale about one of the most infamous military minds of the world — telling the story of how Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambition brought him up only to lay him low in the end. I expected “Napoleon” to be a fine-tuned period piece of the same caliber as “Gladiator” (another film with Ridley Scott directing and Joaquin Phoenix delivering a career-defining performance), but met only disappointment. “Napoleon” felt pieced together like a history textbook, with paragraph after paragraph telling a chronological story, at least, but not a compelling one.
Sony marketed “Napoleon” as a fresh take on history that would tell Bonaparte’s story through the “prism” of his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Joséphine. Going into the theater, I believed wholeheartedly in Vanessa Kirby’s ability to flesh out a character who had, until now, gone mostly unnoticed in the shadow of a bigger player. I had seen Kirby do it before as Princess Margaret in “The Crown” (a role which earned her an Emmy nomination), and I figured she would do well as Empress.
Again, I was disappointed. I can understand making Joséphine a mere extension of Napoleon for plot purposes (which the film did), but I have a harder time understanding how the movie could make such an intense, volatile character fall so flat, which the film somehow managed to do with Joséphine, too. I never once felt the passionately toxic emotional connection that the film tried to convince me existed between Joséphine and Napoleon; thus, I never felt the full effects of the relationship’s dissolution which the film tried to make the climax of the movie.
With this unconvincing relationship as its premise, the movie — much like Napoleon’s rise to power — was doomed from the beginning. Neither Kirby nor Phoenix could have saved a film with such robotic romance, awkward eroticism or that Pride and Prejudice song.
“Napoleon” was, at times, both brilliant and brutal, but it had only a tiny fraction of the source material’s original genius. Many scenes inclined me to feel some admiration for Bonaparte as a master tactician, others comedically indulged in the “small man, big temper” stereotype around him (see Napoleon complex), and still other scenes did, as promised, unveil a few details about a historic relationship I’d never considered before.
Unfortunately, those scenes came together in a disjointed mess that made no sense, neither as a historically accurate docudrama, nor as the complete work of “faction” I’ve come to expect from most historical biopics. I had hoped that the 157-minute runtime might lend itself to a more cohesive story arc for a historical “epic,” but unlike films such as, dare I say, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,“ the length was wasted on scenes that could do nothing to enhance the story. I'm not confident that Ridley Scott's upcoming four-and-a-half hour director's cut will help.
I left the theater disappointed at what I had wanted to be Scott’s best since “Gladiator,“ but unlike his other most recent period piece, “The Last Duel,” “Napoleon” couldn’t even get me to turn inward and reflect on what I had just seen. All it managed to do was turn one of France’s most prominent historical figures into a flat farce. We might never forget the brief reign of Bonaparte, but we’ll probably forget “Napoleon” soon enough.
