Napoleon | Human Flaw as Eternal Legacy

Quite late for the conversation around the brief hype this one aroused around the weeks of its release that settled for a battle or arguments that, when not just appreciating the movie ok, it was damming it as the worst thing ever, that spitted in the face of history. My curiosity only grew!

I should’ve waited for the promised four-hours Director’s Cut that is supposed to come out on Apple TV + this year (and hope someone borrow me their account for me to check it out), but giving the benefit of the doubt that Scott promised two director’s cuts for both <i>Exodus</i> and House of Gucci that never saw the light of day (I guess because no one really cared about those either, so I get it), and I’m being quite curious to see the supposed horrendous offense that his Napoleon was, I jumped into it in the earliest opportunity.

I was at least hopping for a decent enough movie that would’ve felt trimmed down in areas that would’ve been fixed in a later cut. I wasn’t however expecting to watch what’s quite easily Scott’s best film this past decade (yes better than Last Duel, so that means he delivered two bangers then!) and easily entered his top 10 best! Napoleon may definitely lack in spots, but what’s good here, is Scott at his sheer best!

Needless to say that, much like with sci-fi, period epics is an area where Scott can go in and pull off something striking impact with his eyes closed, with varying levels of quality sure, but at their best, they result in brawny pompous production value spectacle that none in the business can top. Thankfully, Napoleon belongs to the big league of Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel and Gladiator!

With an added extra dose of dramatic sarcasm that has been the star of these late Scott films, resulting in a farcical comedy by the ways of traditional Hollywood biopic and a melancholic tale of surviving legacy despite our most intrinsic of human’s weaknesses. Melding together comedy of manners, sickening romance and meditative character study meeting gargantuan blockbuster-epic production; all that feels RIGHT UP MY ALLEY! Take it as mine completely biased opinion or let’s roll with the fact that mister Scott at near 90 years of age remains a juggernaut to be topped.

Given how much detractors he gathers up today, especially when he's deemed the studio / mainstream / generic of the Scott brothers when compared to Tony by his defenders / appreciators. The truth about Scott is that he's a masterful craftsman ever since his heyday, that on occasion he gets some weird / out of the box author inspirations.

So in order to really appreciate a Ridley Scott film, you gotta know where you're walking into. He has some shameful stingers, which also added to make him quite unpredictable, but one major asset that can help you distinguishably define when a Scott film is going to work is usually defined by either he's working with a good script American Gangster, The Martian, All the Money in the World) or is one of his passion projects.

Napoleon feels part of the latter in the same way of Kingdom of Heaven was. His heart and vision are fully in compactual understanding of what he's trying to achieve. An sprawling historical epic by the ways of an unorthodox character study that has the emotional intimate and the ranging vastness of his legacy walking in troubling, but effectively tight synchrony.

in many ways, Napoleon works like a re-update on The Duelists and its years-spanning conflict of a man facing a troubled relationship; now worked in the macro scale of the Napoleonic wars taking now central stage from where it merely acted as the backdrop in Scott’s debut; with all its complex layered politics and power struggles lead by one man with an inflated opinion of his abilities, and well he proves his worth. Maybe disappointing for those expecting to see Kubrick’s original Napoleon script come to life (you gotta demand Spielberg that one) and not the closest a historical biopic came close to a Leslie Nielsen comedy.

But from Kubrick, Scott does takes a glaring wavering at Barry Lyndon from which he borrows not only the painterly texture of images in emulated natural light, and the latent ironic sense of humor, especially in the use of time-period classic compositions much as Schubert’s Piano Trio 2nd movement was used and is replicated here by newcomer Martin Phipps making a rendition – that delivers one hell of a soundtrack may I add (turning a remixed La Marseillaise as his Main Theme was sort of genius);

But also in the almost buffoonery slapstick, seen in chaotic confrontations shot in frantic invasive hand-held around the French political circle and the palace shenanigans we see Napoleon in his intermittent encounters with Joséphine. Though specially in what forms next to Barry Lyndon, two very similar stories about a frivolous man wanting to ascend to the upper class, but he's tramped by his own humanity, too flawed, too troubled to fit in.

Ridley is being in a ‘gives zero fucks’ stride in his last couple of movies, that’s building up to be his most interesting phase yet. Alien Covenant being the blatant example in how turned the expected Alien-horror into a full on Gothic / Lovecraftian slasher; or All the Money in the World took a world-wide ransom/hostage thriller and turned into a Citizen Kane ‘capitalism devouring itself’ character study of the most charming putrid Christopher Plummer ever looked on screen; with The Last Duel maybe being an outlier of formalist traditional drama – excellently executed and even prompted a discussion of masculinity guideline view of chivalry at the expense of female condition with a bitter sour taste.

But just take House of Gucci, and the best compliment I can give that film is how it has a life of its own in an almost Fellinian way. The same can be applied to <i>Napoleon</i>, but in a even better way! Its characters and dramas are almost absent from life beyond that which is captured in a raw presentation. As they deal with impotence, infertility, react to their own and their partner's emotional inefficiency with frivolous grumbling, which is exactly what makes them dryly human!

The director sees this in how he stages the sheer triviality and theatrical feeling of the customs and palace royalist rituals from the XIX upper class. Paying heavy attention to common, everyday details, constantly reinforcing this personal side that inserts a strong sense of banality amidst the epic depiction of its central figure, seen in a man of almost completely infantile desires and total impatience to deal with political complexity, only clinging to the easy ways out of allies to ascend to control, even if betraying all the principles he once swore to defend during the revolution. Napoleon seeks obedience and reverence at the cost of war if he doesn't get what he wants, rising in political influence through his strength and unstoppable military control.

Between this, one can even read how Joséphine's relationship with Napoleon acts less like the pun of satirical jokes, and rather is directly mirroring his own relationship with France and its people – and I know that might sound over-reading, but cope with me: much like Joséphine, France as a whole (the government, the people) turned over Napoleon over desperation following the brutality of the reign of terror and the threat of fracturing the republic. Napoleon enters on screen like a promise of stability and control, the best they could afford to hope. And in return, his obsessive love for France showcases his desire of tower absolute obedience and control over it.

Now between the chambers, Phoenix and Kirby form a born to be iconic toxic romance. For her wants leverage to regain status at the cost of the little man baby getting unrequited lust and denied emotional intimacy to fixating dependence. While both form a sickening overreliance of one another that can be both disturbingly needy, towards also reflecting real melancholic existentialism of never healed loneliness.

Kirby is definitely selling the strong independent female archetype in front, but all she wants is stability that when threatened, she breaks off her shell. While Phoenix finds the right point of balance between registering caricature and also the unpredictable intriguing from the character: a scholar, out of place, a born leader but with an ego bigger than his ambitions. Timid and socially-awkward that hides a latent nastiness that would’ve left his Arthur Fleck Joker feeling uncomfortable, lashing out like a brute petulant childish tantrum..

There is the whole construction of an invariably authoritarian and psychopathic figure, but not one out of control. You understand how his Napoleon is driven by impulses than he can hold on to as best he can and keep moving forward. It assumes several eccentric and dubious aspects of that figure, but doesn’t simply reduce him into a mere object to guide today's agenda as a deconstruction of masculinity that has become an object of fetish for so-called modern screenwriters. Scott never acts condescendingly towards the character. Never consider him just mad tyrant trope and that's it. He's pathetic, but also cunning; at times a disconcerting buffoon, but you can't say the man hasn't some guts and wit.

With that, the central disparity becomes clear: the ridiculous and the heroic of the figure. Human inefficiency is incompatible with the grandiloquent and mythological grandeur that shapes history. Playing with our very reaction towards it, how one is unable accept that these figures were humans as ridiculous and complex as me and you are incapable of being accepted. That's why the most critical ones shout to the winds about 'historical accuracy’ and perjures it as a qualitative point lost by the film, which reveals itself as a tremendous injustice. Of course, historical value is invaluable and it would be a valid criticism if that were the case, which Napoleon is far from being.

What makes linearity exchanges of certain events or places that a certain individual was in that space of time in comparison to another are fictitious relocations that do nothing to spoil the factual center of the documented events and what they form about the central persona. Maybe some ridicule him more, others exaggerate a little, however, the essence of what is transmitted remains the same!

But people are so quick to get up in arms just because the movie decided to embrace a satirical edge. That once you see him blowing up the Pyramids you see the movie-twitter / letterboxd LOSING THEIR MINDS over pretending to care about historical inaccuracy, while dismissively missing the small symbolic meaning in such action, which reflects Napoleon showing him like a petty vandal that basically destroyed his way through nations to satiate his ambitions for greatness. Especially in his encounter with the pharaoh's sarcophagus, that reflects his complete human insignificance in face of history and legacy forever engraved in time, while he quietly aches to be part of the same greatness!

That’s the very heart of the movie: to reconcile the epic aspect with the intimate personal clashes of the protagonist. That’s maybe why Scott’s ability to build scale never looked better. The scope and depth feel tactile, like actually on the screen in lavishing massive detail. Where early XIX century France looks like a grayish lived in modernity, and the battles are viscerally unforgiving even to a poor horse having its chest blown off, to having massive hordes running in the frame. The stand out being in Austerlitz balletic massacre that recaptures those 2000s blockbuster epics energy back into life in sadistic GLORY.

Now, if one wants to really complain about historical accuracy let it be here in the tinniest Waterloo battle I’ve ever seen recreated on screen: geographically all wrong and small looking with Napoleon charging into battle which was completely weird – and please go see Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo for further context on why this just ‘lacks’. But that still has some ferocious punch of carnage and nice captured tension in between the rivaling players – I can never get mad seeing hundreds of men tearing themselves apart with bayonets!

With Rupert Everett nearly steals the entire film away in the last third, completely conveying the British snob persona to a teeth, but also reflecting the other very latent sexual pretense subtext running around the movie, shown not in all the comical screwing between Napoleon and Joséphine; but the very power dynamics over displayed between sex and military tactician. With Everett’s Duke Wellington clearly making Napoleon his bitch in the ending when he says: “The battle is mine”.

I can spot the 10 out of five more in here, if it wasn’t for the weird lapses of time that sometimes run over each other, or they alternate so disjointedly with something seeming to be missing between the moments to let them flow in harmony. Specially in the middle section where you get a lot of jumping around the political intrigue following Napoleon’s rise to power and his love/hate matrimonial struggles with Joséphine and hey another BIG EPIC battle.

You can clearly feel a whole lot of trimmed down was made, but even still, there’s a intact throughline to it all that has the movie flowing in the traditional biopic standards. And within it, it does handle the ellipses well through a dry, almost sarcastic-inducing way, like time passing through Napoleon unable to match up with his endless advance. I however saw many saying the movie misses out on delivering too us who is Napoleon after all, missing a final cathartic point.

Well, if the crux of Napoleon's entire depiction of his idiosyncratic figure seen in many other iterations and depictions regards less about the historical events he took part in – which the film even faithfully covers well: his beginnings in Toulon, the ridiculously ambitious advance into Egypt, his peak in Austerlitz, the collapse in Russia and the torturous fall from exile on Elba to the final shot at Waterloo; and rather the entire focus always navigates towards his unpredictable and famously known snobbish temperament.

A LOT of his glory (and losses) barely get a mention which might be a sign of the movie lacking or actually leaving us hungry for more, definitely the latter. But the ending point is clear enough:

Where while keeping with biopic traditions of giving us final text information, Scott instead of just stating some final facts of the aforementioned titular figure final moments and legacy, it instead focuses on the whole lots of deaths the French military endured under his command; in the end Napoleon conquered his legacy after all, on top of mountains of corpses. And yet, the scheming awfully selfish monster was able of love and devotion till the end – for his nation, for a woman, for his beliefs…

Despicable absolutely, but also inspiringly intriguing…

A living contradiction, as we all!