Napoleon: Full of Sound and Fury — But Signifying What?

I’ve never entirely understood why, when the subject is death-dealing psychopathic dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Napoleon almost always gets a pass. No, he didn’t put Jews into concentration camps — in fact, one of his few genuine reforms was the closing down of the Jewish ghettos and the granting of full equality to Jews — but the military exploits by which he sought to conquer all of Europe cost millions of lives. 

Upon learning that the director Ridley Scott, now 85, had just released a new movie about Napoleon with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, I opened for the first time a big, beautiful book that my father and I purchased about 50 years ago from a Barnes & Noble remainder pile. Published in 1964, it’s entitled A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars, and it was originally compiled for the education of cadets at West Point. (I wonder: does West Point still teach about the battles of Napoleon, or is it too busy fighting white supremacism?)

In the introduction to this book, you can read that whether you’d have fought under him or against him, “Napoleon was truly a great captain, one who played a major role in the history and development of the military art. Few, if any, commanders, before or since, fought more wars and battles under more varied conditions of weather, terrain, and climate, and against a greater variety of enemies…. His understanding of mass warfare and his success in raising, organizing, and equipping mass armies revolutionized the conduct of war and marked the origin of modern warfare. By the very extent of his operations, he brought logistics into being as the necessary teammate of strategy.” (READ MORE: Jingle Smells Becomes an Instant Christmas Classic)

Pretty impressive, I guess. And that’s not all. In addition to the war atlas, I inherited from my father a dusty four-volume life of Napoleon that was written by one J.C. Abbott and originally published in 1855. Until now I never looked into this tome, either. (Better late than never.) “The history of Napoleon,” writes Abbott in his preface, “has often been written by his enemies. This narrative is from the pen of one who reveres and loves the Emperor.” Abbott (1805-77), according to Wikipedia, was a Congregationalist pastor (!) from Maine and the author of several books on Christian ethics. Why did Abbott revere Napoleon? One reason, he explains, is that Napoleon “abhorred war, and did everything in his power to avert that dire calamity.” Really? Napoleon hated war? Another reason is that Napoleon “nobly advanced equality of privileges and the universal brotherhood of man.” Well, in some ways. But he also, among other things, reinstated slavery in France in 1802, eight years after its abolition. 

Not that I’m an expert on any of this stuff. As it happens, my education about Napoleon began with the 1954 movie Desiree, which I repeatedly watched on TV as a kid. (I was home sick a lot. That’s when I learned the most.) It focused on the relationship between Napoleon (Marlon Brando) and Desiree Clary (Jean Simmons), the merchant’s daughter who was engaged to him when he was a young army officer and who remained a part of his social circle in Paris even after she became Crown Princess of Sweden, an enemy of France in the Napoleonic Wars. 

Even as a lad, I was savvy enough to recognize as Tinseltown hooey the version of history presented in Desiree, which ends with her talking him, after Waterloo, into accepting exile in Saint Helena, and thus saving Europe from yet another round of bloodshed. Nor was it lost on me that this guy who’d led a massive army of soldiers to their deaths was, for no very clear reason, treated in that picture as a relatively sympathetic figure. Still, Desiree was lots more fun to watch than Abel Gance’s 1927 silent classic Napoleon, which is regarded as a landmark in cinematic history but which, when I saw it recently, in Francis Ford Coppola’s four-hour-long edit (cut down from the original 5 ½ hours), made me weep — from boredom. 

One thing that Gance’s movie underscores is that Napoleon’s story isn’t exactly cinema-ready. Some people’s life stories have, as they say, an arc; Napoleon’s, not so much. It’s one battle, one military campaign, after another, interrupted by a couple of big set pieces — his self-coronation as emperor and his dumping of Josephine — and followed by exile. Oh, and then, in a dramatically clumsy coda, another big battle, and another exile. Napoleon’s career is as much of a narratological mishmash as the history of the “long” French Revolution itself — from the fall of the Bastille to the Paris Commune of 1871 — of which it’s a part. 

It seems like a tall order, in other words, to tell Napoleon’s story in a dramatically riveting way. Or am I wrong? To find out the answer, I went to see Scott’s film. And the answer is — well — complicated. Yes, Scott (whose oeuvre includes Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and one of my all-time favorites, Hannibal) is brilliant at staging all those battles. His rendering of Austerlitz, in particular, is masterly. I never thought I’d care about military strategy, but during his Austerlitz sequence, I looked forward to perusing the chapter on that epic battle in the Military History and Atlas.

Still, Napoleon, written by David Scarpa and clocking in at two hours and 45 minutes, turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. And the most problematic element is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Throughout the Reign of Terror, the Royalist insurrection of 1795, and the Egyptian campaign of 1798 – all of which involve rather serious microaggressions – he doesn’t really show any emotion at all. (I was reminded of David Morse’s ultra-stoic portrayal of George Washington in the John Adams miniseries.) But then he meets Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and comes to life — although in a range of weird ways. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The Crown’s Death Porn)

When we first see the future empress, she’s the very definition of louche. She’s playing cards at a watering hole that looks (in a distinctly French way) at once chic and squalid, and she’s wearing a top that shows off her décolletage rather provocatively. Napoleon notices her, but his expression is inscrutable, and his conversation, when she approaches him, is virtually nonexistent. Nonetheless, they start courting. Their early tête-à-têtes are Pinteresque — clipped lines of dialogue and long silences as they sit at arm’s length from each other on a couch — and when they eventually get it on, they’re a lot more like two wild dogs mating in a junkyard than like Brando and Simmons in Desiree.

Indeed, far from having even the remotest hint of romance, charm, or finesse in him, Phoenix’s Napoleon, during his intimate moments with Josephine, brings to mind the most bizarre bits of Kubrick’s kinky, creepy Eyes Wide Shut and, once or twice, believe it or not, actually recalls Mel Brooks, as Louis XIV in The History of the World, Part I, getting goofily grabby in the gardens of Versailles (“It’s good to be the king!”). When Phoenix’s Napoleon, who’s just finished subduing Egypt, hears that Josephine has been cheating on him, he rushes back to France for a series of enigmatic exchanges with her that come off like pretentious outtakes from Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage or from some earnest early-sixties concoction like The L-Shaped Room. Is even a second of this grounded in reality? What are Phoenix, and Scott, going for here?

As for the other major performances, what to say? The French politicians — from Talleyrand to Robespierre to Marshal Ney — kind of blend into one another, with their grand uniforms and period wigs and heavy makeup. (Speaking of makeup, I didn’t even recognize Rupert Everett as Wellington.) One actor who does stand out is Édouard Philipponnat as the young, charming Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who in a few brief appearances goes from being Napoleon’s enemy to being his friend to being his enemy again. In this cast of (frankly) very odd characters, he’s the closest to being relatably human. (READ MORE: Gaza: What Nixon Would Do)

All artists are at the mercy of timing. Sometimes it benefits them, sometimes not. The fact that Napoleon opened just a few weeks after the monstrosities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 is unfortunate for Scott, not least because his movie begins with a horribly grisly depiction of the guillotining of Marie Antoinette that can’t help reminding you of the decapitations in the kibbutzim and at that dance party in the Negev. And Marie Antoinette, as it turns out, isn’t the only one to lose her head in this film.

To watch Napoleon is to be aghast at his transcontinental butchery — and to ponder his motives. Historians write about his eagerness to spread the French Revolution, topple monarchies, and create a United States of Europe characterized by liberty, equality, and fraternity. But Scott doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in such matters and doesn’t strain to address the obvious contradictions. (Why, for example, would a principled enemy of royalty want to found a dynasty?)

So why did Scott make this picture? Simply to offer a spectacle of sheer savagery on an unimaginable scale? If you’ve seen his earlier work, you know he’s drawn to gore. Yes, Napoleon is better than last year’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, but in Scott’s film, unlike Edward Berger’s, there’s never any suggestion that we’re expected to be appalled at the extraordinary and meaningless loss of human life. On the contrary, the idea seems to be to impress us with Napoleon’s mastery of (as the Military History and Atlas put it) the military art.

I was surprised, then, that Napoleon ended with a title card listing the number of casualties in Napoleon’s major battles, plus his total death count: three million. So is this really an antiwar movie, after all? What does Scott, in the final analysis, want us to make of Napoleon? Beats me. The great failure of this film — which, I must admit, has a not inconsiderable degree of greatness in it — is that after staring into Joaquin Phoenix’s eyes for two hours and 45 minutes, we still haven’t got the slightest clue as to what’s going on behind them.

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