The Epic: Napoleon (Dir Ridley Scott, 2h35m, 2023)

Napoleon Bonaparte is no stranger to the Epic. The shadow of the Corsican stretches, at grand scale, over film as a whole, but as the protagonist, or villain of cinematic epics, he has no rival. There is Gance's magnificent silent epic (1927), surviving thanks to its subsequent restoration by the film historian Kevin Brownlowe, Guitry’s Napoleon (1955), best seen in its three hour French cut, King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956), in which Herbert Lom's Napoleon towers and glowers, Gance's return to Napoleonic cinema in Austerlitz (1960), that bizarrely cameos Orson Welles, and the film that arguably killed the historical Epic, 1970's Waterloo, and Stanley Kubrick's unrealised and meticulously researched project, perhaps the greatest of all lost films.

 The Epic in 2023 is a strange place to explore Napoleon, yet, here we find Ridley Scott once more, directing Napoleon, an epic film sandwiched between two other epics, the critically mauled medieval epic, The Last Duel and a return to the Roman arena in Gladiator II. The Epic itself, revived in the 1940s and 1950s to directly combat television, has now become its chiefest weapon; for an industry where the average film length is now nearly half an hour longer than the 1990s, epicly-scaled films releasing purely theatrically are increasingly now becoming rarer. Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon both released on Apple TV with limited theatrical release, Denis Villeneuve's Dune released in two parts over eighteen months, whilst streaming series have, since the pandemic, become the de-facto form of long-form storytelling. Why, after all, make a three and a half hour film when it can be a five hour miniseries? 

Napoleon's centre is Joaquin Phoenix's perfornance as the general

Into this strides Napoleon. At base its structure is remarkably old-fashioned-it is, in essence, the life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) from arrival as a young gunnery officer to master tactician to First Consul of France to Emperor, to exile, and beyond. It is a biopic, an epic, as they used to make epics, a breakneck charge through the life of Napoleon from beginning to end. Scott's great thesis, via the script by David Scarpa, also responsible for the brisk workmanlike The Richest Man in the World, also directed by Scott, is that Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), the great love of Napoleon's life, is the real power behind the throne, and that her relationship with France echoes that of the general and Emperor. It's a bold step, one that attempts to cut across over three decades of a man's life. In this it is not entirely successful.

Where Napoleon does work is in the man himself, and in depicting that tactical mind brought to bear in the film's action scenes. Even here, Scott's vision is somewhat confused; Phoenix plays Napoleon throughout, from twenty two in the opening scenes in Paris, with the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, to his death on St Helena nearly thirty years later. There is no attempt to de-age him, digitally or otherwise, and there are a number of early scenes that come off as awkward with Phoenix, in his late forties acting as the young Napoleon, half his age. Once the film is into the swing of things; once we arrive at the Siege of Toulon, his first major victory, and with the beginning of Napoleon and Josephine's relationship, so Phoenix's performance, does, at least, coalesce. 

Phoenix plays Napoleon as the ultimate outsider, an often eccentric, usually weird figure who makes rash decisions that occasionally lead to some of the greatest military victories of all time, alongside some very bad military, and personal, decisions. In places, the weirdness is disarming, memorably hopping onto a box to peer, face to face, at an Egyptian mummy, elsewhere it's (unintentionally) hilarious, screaming at one of the English diplomats once the Napoleonic Wars have commenced "You think you're so great just because you have BOATS!" This facet of Napoleon comes across as awkward, unappealing, and whilst some of Scott and Phoenix's impression of him as such is deliberate, this outsider energy that powers many of Joaquin's most notable roles to date, much of it makes for poor company, this nervy livewire figure that just happens to be the most powerful man in Europe. 

Elsewhere, Napoleon is a film in a hurry and outside of its centrepiece at Austerlitz its speed outpaces its skill

Yet, throughout, Phoenix's Napoleon is definitely engaging. Away from the battlefield, manoeuvring through the corridors of power, he's less sure, The Coup of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon and among others, his brother, essentially wrests power from the ashes of the French Revolution is a farce, Napoleon rolling down the stairs, swearing as he goes, throwing a punch in against those defending; the coronation that inevitably follows is equally idiosyncratic, the crown not quite fitting. We see him grow from the nervousness of Toulon, most notably seen in the odd little tic that accompanies all of his battle appearances, of hands over ears as cannon roar, to master of Europe at Austerlitz, his troops mowing down the Austrian and Russian forces with tactical precision. They are also, incidently, the only place where Scott, Scarpa and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski let the film breath. Austerlitz in particular has some beautifully stark cinematography where the white snow and ice of the battlefield, and the cold water below, slowly stain red.

For Napoleon elsewhere is delivered at breakneck speed; to try and fit one of the most richly complex lives in modern history into two and a half hours seems less like madness and more sadism; but for the battlescenes, the film proceeds with roughly the speed and poise of a cannonball, and given how quickly these are there and gone-the Battle of the Pyramids is roughly a minute long. One has to consider what Messrs Scott et al are actually aiming for. Napoleon is, after all, largely intended for streaming, and Apple's other major release of 2023, Killers of the Flower Moon, on the same budget and given much the same fanfare by Apple TV, stretches almost luxuriously over nearly four hours. Scott, one can only assume, cut the film together with Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo at this pace deliberately, for as has become derigeur for Scott these days, a Director's Cut hoved into view several months later, much improved upon the theatrical and over a far more reasonable three and a half hours.

Nothing suffers from this mad dash to fit every major event in Napoleon's life like his relationship with Josephine; at points Kirby feels like she's being cantilevered into the machinery of the film, her appearances, her complex relationship with Napoleon, something that, after all, could and probably should have been the focus of the film-it still isn't in the near four hours of Scott's Director's Cut-feel like they're being delivered at the same manic pace as the rest of the film where they should be glimpses into what Napoleon is like divested of power and generalship: for all Phoenix and Kirby's attempts, they barely scratch the surface

Like France itself, whose relationship with the general remains complex more than two centuries on, Josephine is little more than a cypher; he wins her, fights for her, and loses her, the film ending on  Smt Helena as he dreams of her. For all Scott's skill in bringing to life Napoleon's conquests, he misses the drive of the man, other than in forward momentum, misses the bond between Napoleon and Josephine, Napoleon and France, and in a rushed attempt to cram one of the great figures of history into two and a half hours, and despite the electric performance of Joaquin Phoenix, seems to miss the point of the Western fascination with Napoleon entirely. 

Rating: Avoid

Napoleon is available via AppleTV

Next week, and indeed, next month, we turn from films on a grand scale to films in a single location, beginning with Hitchcock's claustrophobic Lifeboat.