Photo courtesy of Dennis Jarvis via Flickr.
While “Napoleon” depicted Napoleon’s love life accurately, it contained many other inaccuracies.
By Woodlief McCabe ’23
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses murder and mass death.
On Friday, Dec. 3, the Mount Holyoke History Department sponsored a trip to Tower Theaters to see the latest historical epic. Unfortunately, Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” was a disappointment — the tone and the narrative are incomprehensible. It feels like the film can’t decide between being a warrior epic, a tragic love story or a comedy. It's not impossible to do all three, so it’s a letdown to see a skilled director like Scott fumble.
Scott has made some waves with his gruff dismissal of criticism by historians for a list of historical inaccuracies within the film long enough to fill their own article. He’s openly admitted to not reading much history about Napoleon. He did, however, obsessively consult with historians to learn about the psychology of Napoleon’s battles and relationship with his former wife, Josephine. The payoff ended up too confusing, too distant from reality and generally adrift in a narrative constructed off of the vague shape of Napoleon’s life. The Napoleonic period is a highly studied area of history, and “Napoleon” follows a narrative that historians like Zack White recognize as closer to British propaganda of the emperor than reality.
“Scott has made some waves with his gruff dismissal of criticism by historians for a list of historical inaccuracies within the film long enough to fill their own article. ”
“Napoleon” gets off to a rough start in terms of establishing what we know or should know. It confuses the audience with its expectations. Though Scott may not care about historical accuracy, we are expected to keep up with 18th-century French politics, or at least his version of it. The poor sense of time in the film doesn’t help either. Sometimes, we get a title card with a location or date change — other times, we open at a new location and realize a year has passed.
Overall, there’s sort of an avant-garde approach to subtitles. In the beginning, we are introduced to one character that Napoleon is speaking to when a looping script subtitle gives us his name and title. Strangely, it does not identify the other characters in the scene — there is not a consistent way in which we learn who is who in the film. If Ridley Scott wants us to see an unhindered vision of French politics without clunky introductions, then one may wonder why he includes a scene in which Napoleon addresses a bunch of characters by name in a row. Most of these characters have little importance in the rest of the film anyway.
Major events like the coronation take little time and are given little significance. We go from Napoleon receiving the suggestion of assuming power as the emperor to being crowned in about three scenes. Napoleon’s divorce from Josephine hangs over many scenes. Her inability to produce an heir leads to tortured conversations and a painful dynamic. When Napoleon has a son with his second wife, he brings the child to meet Josephine. This painful moment has some rare poignancy when Josephine tells the child, “One day you will know what I have sacrificed for you.” We never see the child again, despite his critical importance to the narrative.
The hardest thing about writing this review is finding the right words to warn potential audiences about how sexually charged this movie is. Much of Josephine’s scenes have to do with the couple’s zealous sex life, desire for sex and her inability to produce an heir. Napoleon has a “sex noise” he employs to tell Josephine he wants to… well, try for an heir. As a movie, it is relentlessly horny and yet deeply unsexy. Actor Joaquin Phoenix’s characterization leaves us to wonder how Napoleon manages to woo Josephine, much less his other lovers.
Unpleasantness seems to be the goal. The characters are not suave, and the circumstances are dire. Phoenix oscillates between an awkward, soft-spoken outsider and a short-tempered, warmongering maniac. Because of this, Napoleon comes across as deeply insecure, defensive and brutish. This is an intriguing characterization of the French emperor, but it exists in the wrong movie. The rest of the characters don’t seem to be phased by Napoleon’s bizarre nature, and it often seems like they are trying not to react to the idiosyncrasies of Phoenix’s acting.
The film is also unpleasant visually; the bloody violence and loss of life are graphic. The first scene is of the execution of Marie Antoinette, and shortly after, we see a cannonball exploding the chest of Napoleon’s horse. The intent of the graphic imagery doesn’t really find footing by the end of the film. Though politics drive Napoleon, the politics of the film at large are unclear. The film ends with a title card that states the death toll of Napoleon’s wars was three million, yet any deep ponderance about the nature of war and Napoleon’s ruthlessness is undercut by how cool Ridley Scott makes the battle scenes look.
If there is a redeeming element to the film, it is Scott's talent for production design. The dramatic battles show vast battlefield formations as well as close, chaotic shots of soldiers fighting for their lives. The intense choral music in the background almost tricks us into understanding the tone of the film. At the Battle of Austerlitz, we see Napoleonic strategy at play. He traps the Russian army on a frozen lake, then pummels them with cannonballs, leaving them to drown. He then fires on a retreating army. Historians agree that none of this happened. Even in these moments, Napoleon is portrayed as a cunning hero of the battlefield.
Ultimately, the visuals in “Napoleon” outpaced its story. Ridley Scott did not manage to reconcile Joaquin Phoenix’s dedicated character work with the epic plot. It only vaguely represents a historical story. Sometimes, an ahistorical narrative can be its own compelling journey. In this case, though, there is too much of a mess through which we can’t discernibly extract a story. It’s unlikely Ridley Scott will be deterred. According to a profile in The New Yorker, he doesn’t question his instincts when one of his movies fails. Following the negative reviews, Scott probably spent the weekend doing what he did when his 2013 film “The Counselor” bombed: “blast[ing] the shit out of a tennis ball.”