Napoleon (2023)

Review: written Dec 2023

Epic, intimate and surprising

Napoleon as a movie is a project that has challenged some of the greatest directors. Famously Kubrick worked on it for 10 years in great detail but never actually got it made. Then Sir Ridley Scott comes along and achieves an epic historical drama encompassing most of Napoleon’s life, like it’s no big deal. So how has it all panned out..

There’s simply no way to cover the topic of Napoleon in one go, so any filmmaker is looking for ‘an angle’. Ridley has apparently gone for a ‘contrast and compare’ approach; on one hand the military strategist who was never wrong (until he was), and on the other the man who appeared to behave like a hormonal 12 year old with no restraints. So for the former , the scenes of his military career are really well done, even if we are covering a lot of ground in a short time. The battle scenes are huge in scope and yet don’t fall prey for the shaky-cam ‘fog of war’ approach, taking birds eye views where necessary to help us understand the geography and logistics of what is going on. At the same time, the close ups of the fights are bone crunching and intense, never sacrificing the chaos and ugliness with the clarity of the big picture.

On the other hand, in the flip side to his character we have his scenes with Josephine, rather brilliantly portrayed by Vanessa Kirby. She brings a toughness and remarkable balance between the vulnerability of a woman in that era, with an unerring ability to know how to use her own power of control and calculation. Right at the start, she spreads her legs and tells Napoleon that if he looks down , he will see a surprise, and once he sees it, he will always want it. It is perfectly delivered, and sets the tone of their relationship from that point.

As for Bonaparte, in these scenes Joaquin Phoenix plays him at his most imperfect. Driven by his desire, frustrated by his inability to rule and conquer the way he would on the battlefield, and thwarted in the political need to have an heir, these scenes are complex and work on their own merit. It’s the gear crunch between these two sides that can be disorienting, or even jarring – but then, maybe that’s the point Ridley was trying to make? His hormonal teenager side bringing stubbornness into his military life, and his thirst for power contaminating his love life? If that is the intent, it’s an ambitious goal, which is successful only in part, because the overall effect of the constant switching is to dilute the pace and momentum of the movie, making the lengthy run time feel a little extravagant.

I hear there’s a director’s cut possibly coming to streaming – in long format with pause for breaks, it will be interesting to see how the pacing issues feel, and if the character study is given more room to breathe.

Until then, it’s clearly not a perfect movie, but an impressively ambitious one, and it’s always preferable to watch an ambitious movie with flaws, than a perfect but uninspiring movie, so I’m giving this the thumbs up.