Napoleon review – a dirty, bloody epic

When the first trail­er for Rid­ley Scott’s long-await­ed Napoleon biopic dropped in July, var­i­ous his­to­ri­ans had a lot to say about how Sir Rid seemed to be por­tray­ing the leg­endary French­man. ​“Napoleon Bona­parte was a TER­RI­BLE PER­SON.” Tweet­ed Pro­fes­sor David Andress. ​“He was a TYRANT. He betrayed every ide­al he ever claimed to stand for. He was a shame­less patho­log­i­cal liar who killed mil­lions of peo­ple for his own insa­tiable van­i­ty. He is lit­er­al­ly one of the worst peo­ple in his­to­ry.” Mean­while, Dan Snow took to Tik­Tok to break down the his­tor­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cies in the trail­er, includ­ing the fact Marie Antoinette’s head would have been shaved before her execution.

How did Rid­ley Scott respond to this crit­i­cism? ​“Get a life.” It seems there’s no hard feel­ings with Snow – the pair lat­er sat down to record a pod­cast on their shared inter­est in Napoleon’s life – and to Andress’s point, he might have jumped the gun a bit. Scott’s film ends with a title card that sets out the death toll from each of Napoleon’s major bat­tles, land­ing on the esti­mat­ed fig­ure of 3 mil­lion dead in less than 20 years. Hard­ly hagiography.

Still, it’s under­stand­able why some might have reser­va­tions. Scott’s his­tor­i­cal dra­ma oeu­vre spans the good (Glad­i­a­tor), the bad (House of Guc­ci) and the ugly (Exo­dus: Gods and Kings). Yet he main­tains a pace few film­mak­ers even half his age can keep up with, hav­ing made 11 films in the past 13 years (Glad­i­a­tor 2 is resum­ing pro­duc­tion after halt­ing dur­ing the SAG-AFTRA strike, though Scott has already edit­ed the 90 min­utes he shot before they downed tools). Per­haps what fas­ci­nates Scott about Napoleon – and indeed all the oth­er men of his­to­ry he’s zoomed in on over the years – is the work ethic.

Either way, in this blood-soaked, rain-streaked account of Napoleon’s life from the French Rev­o­lu­tion onwards, Joaquin Phoenix plays the short-lived Emper­or of France as an awk­ward obses­sive with an insa­tiable appetite for destruc­tion. The auda­cious open­ing, in which Marie Antoinette walks to the guil­lo­tine, sees Napoleon seek­ing a pro­mo­tion. His pub­lic life is framed as a series of chess moves, but not those played by a grand­mas­ter – rather the inso­lent whims of an impa­tient school­boy hun­gry for glory.

Lit­tle changes when Napoleon meets Joséphine de Beauhar­nais (Vanes­sa Kir­by on excel­lent form), a wid­owed aris­to­crat with two chil­dren. He is instant­ly infat­u­at­ed and mar­ries her quick­ly, before being dis­patched on a cam­paign in Egypt. In the swel­ter­ing heat, he thinks only of her, and when he hears rumours that Joséphine is hav­ing an affair back in France, he is so incensed he returns to Europe in a rage, risk­ing rep­ri­mand for deser­tion. Napoleon kicks Joséphine out and rep­ri­mands her before they are reunit­ed – the rela­tion­ship between them is com­plex and often unhealthy, but there is love that exists between them. Screen­writer David Scarpa is keen to frame Napoleon’s twin pas­sions as his wife and his coun­try, but as it becomes increas­ing­ly clear that Joséphine is unable to give him an heir, he is will­ing to sac­ri­fice the for­mer in ser­vice of the latter.

Much will be made of Scott’s focus on Napoleon’s great vic­to­ries and loss­es – he has proven him­self time and time again a mas­ter of mount­ing action scenes at scale. Auster­litz, Water­loo and the Fire of Moscow are recre­at­ed in stag­ger­ing, bru­tal detail, with hun­dreds of extras and gal­lons of fake blood, evok­ing the cli­max of his under­rat­ed 2021 medieval epic The Last Duel.

On sheer spec­ta­cle alone Napoleon deliv­ers, though the whis­tle-stop tour of Napoleon­ic pol­i­tics is a lit­tle less cap­ti­vat­ing – Scott and Scarpa mer­ci­ful­ly lift these scenes by fre­quent­ly allow­ing them to descend into chaos, a sea of boys pompous­ly pre­tend­ing to be men as they squab­ble in courts. In one such moment, an indig­nant Napoleon shouts at the Eng­lish envoy, ​“You think you’re so great because you have boats!” (While this is an accu­rate assess­ment of the British Navy’s atti­tude at the time, it prob­a­bly isn’t word-for-word.)

This sense of humour rip­ples through the film – Rupert Everett tow­ers over Phoenix as The Duke of Welling­ton, nod­ding to the per­sis­tent (though unfound­ed) rumour that Napoleon was espe­cial­ly short, while the sex scenes between Phoenix and Kir­by are as sweaty and strange and deeply unsexy as the con­tents of Napoleon’s much-pub­li­cised cor­re­spon­dence with his wife. Yet there is a sense of deep, unfor­tu­nate love between the cou­ple, and the film’s use of Kirby’s know­ing purr in voice-over towards the end of the film works par­tic­u­lar­ly well (per­haps a nod to the tox­ic romance at the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phan­tom Thread).

Yet it’s under­stand­able that his­to­ri­ans might take umbrage with this fast and loose look at Napoleon. The entire­ty of the Saint-Domingue expe­di­tion is glossed over, despite it cost­ing the lives of an esti­mat­ed 40,000 men (more than the Bat­tle of Water­loo), and poor old Lord Nel­son doesn’t get a look-in either. Per­haps two hours and forty min­utes sim­ply isn’t enough time to tell a sto­ry as grand and com­pli­cat­ed as this – though a four-hour cut is on the way to streaming.

Con­sid­er­ing media lit­er­a­cy is at an all-time low, it’s not unthink­able that his­to­ri­ans wor­ry the most engage­ment the mass­es will ever have with his­to­ry is watch­ing a heav­i­ly fic­tion­alised depic­tion of events on a stream­ing ser­vice. This is a valid con­cern – but arguably not entire­ly Rid­ley Scott’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. As enter­tain­ment Napoleon deliv­ers with­out glo­ri­fy­ing his mil­i­tary record or paint­ing the man as a hero. It’s a sto­ry about pow­er, obses­sion and exploita­tion – which arguably is the sto­ry of his­to­ry itself.