Flasz On Film

One of the longstanding myths surrounding the persona of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican artillery officer who climbed to the top of the world and briefly became the Alexander the Great of his time, is that he never washed. Now, multiple historical sources have consistently debunked this assertion, though I don’t think Ridley Scott’s film with its protracted running time ever showed Joaquin Phoenix take a bath. But that’s neither here nor there and in fact, it would make the movie consistent in its historical inaccuracies, as it has been pointed out in many listicles and think pieces which have popped up recently that Napoleon plays fast and loose with facts. 

Now, I don’t necessarily care that Napoleon never opened artillery fire at the pyramids in Giza. I understand this is a quick visual tool to show the viewer that he conquered Egypt. I equally don’t mind if he never set an ice trap at Austerlitz because the visuals employed in the scene add up to something interesting and may be occasionally arresting. A biopic is not a documentary, as far as I am concerned and it’s not the facts that matter, but rather if the filmmakers tell a good story about characters based on real people. Which is where the problem is because Ridley Scott’s movie has some serious problems. Much like that myth about its namesake, Napoleon doesn’t wash. 

Even a brief look at Napoleon’s Wikipedia page will immediately inform you that the man led an eventful life. And to add to that, in order to fully appreciate certain nuances of the events surrounding his rise to prominence and power, as well as his eventual defeat and downfall, any movie wishing to attempt any kind of holistic analysis of this singular character would have to assume a perspective wide enough to capture a lot of what happened in France at the time.  

Therefore, a film which tries to do a lot – visualize important events, comment on cultural touchpoints (whatever the distance from recorded fact) or explore the nuances of Napoleon’s private life – will have to either be three days long or effectively agree to explore everything in bullet points. Like a glorified music video showing you just about enough for a few seconds at a time for you to understand where you are and why you are where you are in the story, and then to move along promptly. Now, the obvious alternative would be to scale down the operation and refocus the narrative around a particularly key time in Napoleon’s life. Think Downfall about the last days of Adolf Hitler, and in fact you could maybe even draw a few parallels here and there especially as far as the man’s megalomania and callous disregard for human life are concerned. This could have been an intriguing way to get into the headspace of the central character as opposed to skimming the surface of his life story like a disc-shaped pebble hurled at the lake by a teenager on a sunny afternoon.  

But that’s not where we are, unfortunately. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon – visually resplendent as it may be in places – is still a by-the-numbers biopic attempting to shmoosh the man’s entire biography into 158 minutes… and failing at that by the way because the director has officially threatened to release a longer version of the movie on Apple TV Plus. While it wows with its scale and depicts the horror of the French Revolution with the requisite gory detail, Scott’s movie just simply fails to transport the viewer out of the comfort of their seat. It’s a film you watch, not a film you experience, and I think this is an outright failure because there is enough material for at least a handful of much more compelling films hidden here.  

You could imagine an entire narrative focused on Napoleon’s (Phoenix) tumultuous relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). You’d probably make a good movie out of his rise to power. You may even find enough to tell the story of Napoleon’s Grand Armee that saw subjugated European peoples rise against their oppressors join forces and mount an ill-fated offensive on Russia in winter. And definitely – most assuredly and without a shred of a doubt – you could see a Ridley Scott-directed Napoleon’s Downfall about his infamous defeat at Waterloo. Problem is all these movies try to coexist under the aegis of a single production, which flicks between these concurrently running sub-narratives with the rapidity of a couch potato wired on Red Bull and Pringles.  

Consequently, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon just does not compel at all. Sure, Phoenix is great. But when has he been anything but? Lovely – you can trust Ridley Scott will make sure his keen eye for scale will ensure the battle sequences would look well produced. And it’s not that we’ve seen it all before – even though we have… in Gladiator, Exodus: Gods and Kings, or Kingdom of Heaven – but because the story plops along so haphazardly and checks off sub-headings from Napoleon’s Wikipedia page with utmost voracity, the viewer never gets the chance to develop any tangible connection to anything or anyone. It’s a slide show. A very long slide show with battle sequences, beheadings and infrequent bouts of copulation interspersed most likely for comedic effect. However, because the movie is so densely packed with intermingling scenes and spends only so little time in any given moment, even these moments of comic relief aiming to show how much of a gross little man Napoleon must have been play out like those dirty insert shots Tyler Durden spliced into Snow White. I am not exaggerating.  

I’m truly sad to report that Ridley Scott’s latest historical epic is just a boring slogfest that’s as exhausting as it is dense. Even though its central lead is most assuredly aware of his mission to carry the movie on his shoulders and he – quite expectedly – embodies the persona of Napoleon with pizzazz, the filmmaker never allows us to truly meet him. We just watch him do stuff for a few seconds here and a few seconds there before moving on to check in on a historical event elsewhere. And after exactly one hour of this shtick, you will be excused if you’d like to leave the room and go home. No such luck, though, because Sir Ridley will have you superglued to your seat for another 98 minutes, during which time he will keep telling you stories that didn’t happen so quickly, you won’t even notice that Napoleon never takes off his clothes to perform his daily ablutions either.