On Thanksgiving 2023, "Napoleon" Delivers a Big Turkey
You will never hate Napoleon Bonaparte as much as Ridley Scott does
For Thanksgiving, I finally convinced my wife to skip the traditional turkey this year and instead choose a more succulent protein.
Turns out I had my turkey, in the form of a big blue triangle-looking bird atop Napoleon’s head.
The hat is the only cool thing about Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” an inconsistent mess of a romp through the life of the famous French general-turned-emperor.
Scott has served up a huge dish of Napoleon-hate, something I applaud because, as the end credits tell us, he did end up killing millions with his military escapades to Egypt and Russia and back.
But this Napoleon? The film presents us with an incel’s version of him. The movie can’t figure out who this great man was — whiny, babyish, aloof, needy, petty, violent, as possessive as a five-year-old, stupid, delusional, cunning, bratty.
Despite the great Joaquin Phoenix playing Bonaparte, you never know what you are going to get scene to scene. Actually, you will get one thing consistently from Napoleon: mumbling. Lots and lots of mumbling.
A majority of the time, Phoenix plays Napoleon as a brat. In the beginning, he’s starts out aloof and alpha, fighting brilliantly in the battle of Toulon, but after that the movie offers its one major biographical interpretation of him: that all of his military and political exploits had nearly everything to do with his obsession with Josephine.
Once he meets her in the movie, about fifteen minutes in, he turns into what I think is Scott’s version of a toxically masculine incel bro, making dog noises when he wants to do it doggy-style (twice depicted), whining petulantly whenever something doesn’t go his way.
Picture Mr. Phoenix in his tri-cornered hat whining to Mme. Josephine, “how could you care so little for me and my feelings?”
Or, in the most meme-able moment of all, Bonaparte yells at a British consul like an infant whose had his bottle of milk taken away from him, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!”
At that one, my theater all laughed, and this is not trying to be a funny movie. By definition, a turkey of a movie is unintentionally funny, and that’s not great for said movie. (You know it’s bad when the movie is so inartful that it has to give you subtitles, as each character appears at first, to tell you who each character is.)
The problem with this portrayal is it makes absolutely no sense from any psycho-biological or sociological point of view that I know of.
I mean when Napoleon returns from Elba, and his men instantly side with him, you just want to laugh. How could this loony loser of a character inspire hundreds of thousands of tough guys to do great things and follow him?
That’s the problem with Scott’s anti-toxic masculinity, as seen in his last few movies. He cannot account for strong leaders of men who shape world history, via his counter-interpretations of them as weak brats.
The movie tries really hard, by its last act, to make us feel sorry for Josephine, a woman trapped within this great man’s world of bratty stupidity. It makes little sense because the voiceovers constantly read us the love letters between Napoleon and Josephine, which are often tender and sentimental. They seem to love each other, and she seems in writing to adore him. Yet the movie’s visuals are constantly showing a woman cornered by an grown infant.
The way Scott tries to account for this is by depicting a complete discrepancy between their written words and their actions. Whenever a piece of paper is signed in the movie — their marriage certificate or divorce decree, for example — Josephine is forced to say nonsense she doesn’t believe in. Logically, therefore, she doesn’t believe her own love letters. This is probably why, the movie suggests, she slept around and yet wrote ooey-gooey stuff to Napoleon.
That would mean, perhaps, that Scott doesn’t believe what women wrote back then. It’s all male-enforced claptrap designed to make the men happy. I don’t know if I’m right to generalize about Scott’s view of history, yet he keeps presenting this over and over in his films.
“Napoleon” is also mistitled, and it’s going to royally piss off history buffs everywhere, as it did the two I talked to as I exited the theater.
The proper title must be “Napoleon and Josephine,” yet Scott has to pack in 45 minutes of battle scenes. The result is a structure that makes no sense. The battle of Toulon happens within ten minutes, then we get an hour of personal material depicting Napoleon the brat, then Borodino and the invasion of Russia, a good 25 minutes on Waterloo. It’s there where he makes the Duke of Wellington a tough-guy hero-type.
I nearly walked out after 75 minutes, because that hour without anything happening except the wildly inconsistent depiction of Napoleon was tough to take. The movie makes more sense when it’s on the battlefield, even though Scott is obsessed with slo-mo and with showing Russian soldiers getting blown up in winter on a frozen lake, over and over and over.
What did we learn here then?
For future filmmakers, you can’t do the life of Napoleon in 158 minutes, as this movie would have it. The result of this movie’s approach is a “greatest hits” of Bonaparte. It ditches about a hundred remarkable things about the man — whom I loathe, truly — to show about four battles and a lot of juvenile behavior at home.
Perplexingly, the movie has absolutely no vision for how Napoleon became emperor. It’s not clear who would allow or consent to his assent to power, or how it could’ve happened. Not even a reasonable sociopolitical context is presented. The result is that few could be convinced that anybody would honor the loser in this movie as France’s ruler.
And then once he’s ruler, Scott tries to depict him as a tyrant-king who tries to re-enact Henry VIII pettiness. About 45 minutes of the movie is devoted to Napoleon acting like an idiot regarding an attempt to conceive an heir.
I haven’t even written about this movie’s style, an aesthetic nightmare if there ever was one for historical blockbusters. That’s because Scott has chosen not to light this movie at all. Everything is natural lighting. They went all out on the costumes and sets, just so that we couldn’t see them.
I cannot figure out this trend, now a decade old, in blockbuster films. While it might be historically accurate — and I think it’s a over-exaggeration of historical interior lighting by the way — the entire history of movies tells us that audiences want to see pretty pictures. Turn on the lights on set, please!
The only reason I can see Scott not wanting to make pretty pictures here is so that he doesn’t put Napoleon, pun intended, in a good light.
That too fails, because the costume-designer knew how to make even a bratty man look awesome. A whole bunch of people are going to exit this movie wanting to wear that hat. Maybe that’s what I will ask for Christmas.
And you know who wears an awesome tri-cornered hat? The Duke of Wellington. If any filmmaker wants to make the positive, uplifting movie that would inspire us — instead of this turkey of a dark depressing movie — please try your hand at his biopic.
Scott has become more pretentious with every movie. His responses to critics of his films makes him seem like an insecure child.