Movie Review: NAPOLEON

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: November 22nd, 2023 / 01:20 AM

NAPOLEON movie poster | ©2023 Columbia Pictures/Apple Studios

Rating: R
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Rupert Everett, Tahar Rahim, Paul Rhys, Eduoard Philipponnat, Anna Mawn, Marshall Needham, Sinéad Cusack
Writer: David Scarpa
Director: Ridley Scott
Distributor: Columbia Pictures/Apple Studios
Release Date: November 22, 2023

NAPOLEON is a historical biographical drama that has a curious effect. At two hours and thirty-eight minutes, it is seldom dull, but it’s also rarely moving. It is informative, with important dates and events provided in titles, but it also comes off as lopsided.

The screenplay by David Scarpa, the direction by Ridley Scott, and the performance in the title role by Joaquin Phoenix save almost all emotion for the scenes between Napoleon and his eventual wife, Josephine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). What we see on the many battlefields is devastating but seems impersonal.

NAPOLEON chronicles the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his days as a rapidly rising soldier in the French Revolutionary Army (the one instrumental in deposing and executing King Louis XVI) to his promotion to general, then being given the title of Emperor, and on through his death.

With Scott directing, we can pretty much count on breathtaking vistas, superb production values, and intense, massive sequences of warfare. We get all of the above, and they are thoroughly impressive.

But Napoleon is truly emotional only when he is wooing and personally warring with Josephine. The struggle between the couple for the upper hand in the relationship is easy to see as something relevant to couples past and present, noble or not. Kirby makes Josephine a compelling person in her own right, intelligent and desperate for status.

With everything else, we get military strategy and what happens when, but we seldom get a visceral sense of why things are happening. There is one sequence when Napoleon appeals on a human level to a French regiment and gets through to them where we see his appeal, but it comes rather late in the proceedings.

Otherwise, we have little sense of Napoleon’s connection to his men. As he was one of the most successful military leaders of all time, it seems like we ought to at least be presented with a filmmaker’s argument as to what his secret was. Obviously, Napoleon commanded respect, but was he more loved or feared, and how did he achieve either?

Likewise, while this is not strictly confined to Napoleon, there’s an irony in a man who helped destroy a monarchy, with at that time the intention of creating a democracy, then becoming a monarch himself. The mobs have strong sentiments about this, but none of the central characters do.

Speaking of central characters, few besides Napoleon and Josephine are showcased much, save for Sinéad Cusack as Napoleon’s practical-minded mother, and Rupert Everett as Britain’s shrewd general, the Duke of Wellington. It may be that the only person Napoleon truly cared about was Josephine, and that he saw his other interactions are lesser. But since NAPOLEON doesn’t fully put us inside his head or his heart, we should at least get a clearer view of those who helped shape his fate.

As referenced above, the battle sequences have tremendous impact, full of terror and agony, though they are also mostly impersonal. An end title informs us that the cumulative death toll was approximately three million people.

We are never sure of how all of this registers on Napoleon, and perhaps that is the film’s point – he could do what he did because the horror of it didn’t hit him to way it hits us. He may never have grown war-weary throughout his life, but by the end of NAPOLEON, much of the audience will be.

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A historical biopic that’s more interesting than moving

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