For a film that wants to make everything Napoleon did a downstream expression of his obsession with Josephine, the viewer comes away with little sense of either half of their marriage. Phoenix’s Napoleon is in thrall to Josephine, which is only understandable through the film’s narrow vision of his life. Of course this brutish, petulant, joyless man-child would be obsessed with a beautiful enchantress who alternates between belittling and seducing him. The problem arises when Napoleon is that same person to everyone else and therefore unworthy of leading anyone to the corner boulangerie, much less across the frozen Russian steppe. David Scarpa’s script, in perhaps wanting to subvert the great man of history trope, makes it impossible to imagine the character leading anything, so there’s nothing about power or history to take from the entire exercise. Conversely, while Kirby is more recognizable as a person worthy of adoration, her goals are just as mysterious. If she’s attracted to power, why is she so incautious with her affairs with more charming men, justified as they are? She’s certainly not attracted to Napoleon himself, what with the humorous but repulsive noises he makes when he’s horny. The film finds in this marriage its reason for being, but it doesn’t appear to understand it at all.
In failing to elucidate anything in the Bonaparte marriage, Napoleon continues to fall into the other typical biopic traps. Scott and Scarpa take all of Napoleon’s 25-year period of high notoriety as their canvas, instead of any one of several dozen smaller chunks that would have allowed for greater depth and detail. The result is a fatally flawed film that has too much incidence with too little time to flesh out supporting characters or interior motivations. That doesn’t mean the cast isn’t full of British character actors, just that none of them is able to distinguish themselves. The single exception is the young tsar Alexander I (Edouard Philipponnat) who doesn’t leap of the screen as much as he serves as a font of normalcy against Napoleon’s eccentricity. As more time is spent with Alexander I, any point the film might be trying to make about the fallibility of supreme leaders falls away, as this is a man who’s been raised from birth believing he’s anointed by Russian orthodox god to lead. Why isn’t he a basketcase like this uppity Corsican weirdo? The contrast between Napoleon and Alexander further muddles any ideas the film might have about the tectonic shifts happening in Europe during this period, and even tilts the scales towards the consistency of despotic kings over the unpredictability of the meritocracy and patriotism that differentiated France from its neighbors and allowed someone like Napoleon to rise. However, when that rise benefits someone with no apparent gifts, what use is any of it? Of course a Brit like Scott would have this view of the French Revolution.
The aforementioned battle scenes, with all their extras and props and costuming, save Napoleon from unwatchability. Befitting a film about generals, clashes at Austerlitz or Waterloo have a clear strategy, differing from the usual battle scenes that place their characters in the thick of the fighting. However, even these come with asterisks, as the ingenuity on display is reduced to getting an enemy to attack before they should, which doesn’t make the victor look brilliant as much as it makes the loser look stupid. Away from the battlefield, the viewer’s back to stomaching Phoenix doing something that’s almost impossible to imagine: being boring. One of his generation’s best, he’s reduced here to the occasional outburst between stretches of flat nothingness, shot by Dariusz Wolski in a grayed-out color palate. That’s so much of Napoleon in a nutshell; great talents and beautiful settings drained of all their life. This period has so much depth and consequence, and Scott found so little within it. Hopefully, all is not lost for the venerable and prolific director. Steven Spielberg made West Side Story and The Fabelmans after his late-period nadir in Ready Player One. Scott’s got Gladiator II on the way, from a script by… David Scarpa. Oh boy. D+