DOMINIC GREEN REVIEWS NAPOLEON:
Napoleon is a tortured love story, punctuated by six brutal battles. Or Napoleon is six tortured battles, punctuated by a brutal love story. Scott manages the rhythm of the romantic battles and military conquests with deceptive ease, merging the two in Napoleon’s image as a dictatorship merges the public and the private. French society is brutalized and desperate after the Revolution of 1789 and the mass executions of the Terror. Napoleon is brutal, a Corsican artillery officer who rises by the cannon. Joséphine de Beauharnais is desperate, a single mother whose aristocratic husband was guillotined in the Terror and who narrowly avoided the same fate.
As in Scott’s Thelma and Louise, the union of Napoleon and Joséphine is a grand alliance of the damaged and the doomed. Joaquin Phoenix specializes in awkward and inarticulate passions; recall Johnny Cash falling over his microphone or stuttering out his love for June Carter. Phoenix’s Napoleon is brooding, clumsy, and desperate. He puffs up a ladder to surprise the British garrison at Toulon in the first of his battles, fear all over his face. His sexual performance with Joséphine is comically perfunctory; it is clear she doesn’t much enjoy it. Yet once he’s on his horse, he’s firmly planted in the saddle, as though his pot belly has the weight of one of his cannon balls. Horse and rider swagger like a centaur, a mythical figure from Europe’s past and future. We see what Hegel saw when Napoleon passed him in the street at Jena. The emperor is an idea moving through history, marching to the rhythm of his mount and his inner drive.
In his interviews promoting Napoleon while it was in its ultimately stillborn pre-production phase in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick made its eponymous character sound like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch:
His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler. He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come — in a very concrete sense, our own world is the result of Napoleon, just as the political and geographic map of postwar Europe is the result of World War Two. And, of course, there has never been a good or accurate movie about him. Also, I find that all the issues with which it concerns itself are oddly contemporary — the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relationship of the individual to the state, war, militarism, etc., so this will not be just a dusty historic pageant but a film about the basic questions of our own times, as well as Napoleon’s. But even apart from those aspects of the story, the sheer drama and force of Napoleon’s life is a fantastic subject for a film biography. Forgetting everything else and just taking Napoleon’s romantic involvement with Josephine, for example, here you have one of the great obsessional passions of all time.
In contrast, as Rich Lowry asks: “Was Napoleon a dullard?” Or at least the version Ridley Scott wants his 21st century audiences to see. Exit quote: “Napoleon can be considered a proto-fascist dictator, or an enlightened reformer, or some of both, but he could never be considered dull, at least not until portrayed by a stolid Joaquin Phoenix, seemingly unaware that the general was a sparkling personality, a hugely energetic reformer and an inspiring leader of men. As the Wall Street Journal critic Kyle Smith puts it, ‘Mr. Phoenix’s Napoleon could never have commanded so much as a squadron of the Salvation Army.’”