There’s an understated thread – well, understated by his critics – running through the string of films that Ridley Scott has released in the last decade, and it can be concisely summed up as this: I do not give a fuck what you think. In the process of this scorched-earth dismissal of his critics and the iconography that he established over the course of his nearly 50-year career in the cinema, he’s crafted a veritable Licorice All-Sorts of savagery (excepting Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Martian, both of which are informed by the passing of his brother Tony in 2012), firing broadsides at the conventions of the crime drama, the Alien franchise, Kevin Spacey’s career, medieval propriety, the Italians in general, and, now, the French. To wit, there are no wackadoodle Jared Leto accents in Scott’s Napoleon, but those expecting a grand spectacle with the studied seriousness befitting a prestige drama released by an awards-hungry production company like Apple right at a major holiday probably need to cool their jets. What it is, in practice, is a devastatingly funny takedown of one of the most consequential figures in European history, wrapped in the garb of its epic forebears while viciously skewering the ways in which they work.
Like most folks, I read the words “Joaquin Phoenix” when Napoleon was announced and had visions of Commodus, the slimy Roman emperor that Phoenix played in Gladiator nearly 23 years ago (Jesus Christ). In truth, there are tiny echoes of that much-beloved heel role here – he is vain and cruel in equal measure, such as when he orders his artillerymen to fire their cannons at the Great Pyramids in the midst of his Egyptian adventure, ostensibly to intimidate the locals but also to leave his tag on the subway door – but it is a thoroughly modern Phoenix performance in one key way. If actors were saints, Phoenix would be the patron of the Pathetic. That throughline runs through the whole gambit of characters he’s played in recent years, spanning from benign (Doc Sportello) to malignant (Arthur Fleck), and the only actor in his class that he has real competition with would be Leonardo DiCaprio, whose craven stupidity in similar roles serves different ends. What Phoenix possesses that Leo doesn’t is the sense of supernatural unpredictability that he cultivates: Even if he’s playing a well-recognized role, there’s genuinely no telling what he’ll do next. Like a mouthy, sloppy stranger, overserved Fernet shots and bothering the regulars at the goth night, he’s a bouncer’s worst nightmare: Simultaneously the most pathetic loser who has ever lived, yet someone who can easily fuck up a whole lot of people’s evenings.
This is the quality that Phoenix brings to Bonaparte: He’s far from the cunning rogue who swept through the ranks of the French military following the Revolution, who, after Robespierre failed to realize that the caliber of his pistol wouldn’t be able to break through his jawbone, ultimately seized the title of First Consul and then Emperor for himself; and who scared the living shit out of every single head of state on the continent because it seemed like, once his armies were on your doorstep, he’d have tricks up his sleevies to kill as many of your men as humanly possible and humiliate your nation in the peace process. Scott sees him as a fundamentally hollow man who was good at two things — bringing “order” to a divided nation and getting other bastards to die for their country – and who was an utter loser in every other aspect of his life, filled with awkward energy and anxiety. He was the Great Man at that moment in a nation full of would-be despots, but he was a product of circumstance and dumb luck as much as anything he personally contributed. His transformation from a quiet and courtly soldier (following Lincoln’s later tenant of keeping one’s mouth shut and looking like a fool rather than opening it and proving one’s self to be one) who impressed the brass to a brash, idiotic ruler who has little patience for manners and for those he perceives as fools is depicted with an Armando Iannucci-like flair, full of genuinely awkward comedy that is sure to horrify every historian who has staked their claim on preserving his mythos.
See, in forsaking any claim to specific historical accuracy – indeed, if this movie is anything, it’s a broadside to the canonization endowed by time to victorious and authorial autocrats – Scott is able to craft a portrait of Napoleon that acknowledges the reality of the man (yes, his empress cheated on him quite a bit, and his mom was a domineering force in his life) and the contemporaneous portrayals drawn up by his enemies (he’s short, hurr hurr). Much of the film plays like a feature-length Punch cartoon, skewering both the polite noblemen who brought him to the throne and the culture of post-revolutionary France. This is an environment in which a coup attempt could feasibly have been a slapstick chase around a chateau prompted by Napoleon losing his patience with an argument and trying to shout down the entire general assembly, or a food fight could break out at the table between Emperor and Empress amidst their guests. If Scott has any sympathy for a character within the film, it’s Josephine (a biting turn from Vanessa Kirby) who rises from a widow in danger of losing her title to the throne, and whose fall from grace, brought about because she can’t bear Bonaparte a son, sees her trapped at a country manor like a songbird trapped in a cage by a greedy toddler. Her venom thrown at her ridiculous, aloof husband – that food fight is prompted by her shouting “You’re fat!” at him – is fully understandable.
This jaundiced view of the man extends to his military victories, of which only a few are depicted. Of those, the most stylish and interesting is his victory at Austerlitz, which is presented with a fairly clear view of his effective yet ugly tactics in action. Some of his men are sacrificed to lure the Russians and Austrians into a grand trap, in which a surprise force of French soldiers emerge from the woods to attack and force them to retreat across a frozen lake. This is when his artillerymen let their cannons speak, with the final argument of the emperor shattering the ice, we watch as severed legs and arms sink to the bottom and cavalrymen drown along with their horses. Scott’s usage of color in this scene is fascinating – the blue of the water, the red of the blood, the white of the snow-covered ice – a grand slaughter bathed in the colors of French patriotism. This, of all of Napoleon’s victories, is the one that he continuously cites as he leads more men into the fray, all the way up until The Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) and the assembled armies of the Concert of Europe put down his return to power in between exiles at Waterloo. His final actions on the battlefield – a huffing and puffing retreat full of chilly anxiety – mirror the first that Scott shows us, forming a solid circle of powerlessness to complete the arc as he returns to anonymity.
What Scott and Phoenix have done with Napoleon is nothing short of historical vandalism, and it’s a pleasure to watch. If graffiti is often seen as an expression of artistic truth emerging from societal decay, then their metaphorical tagging of the Arc de Triomphe presents to us the rotten core behind the marble, covering the façade with color and disrupting its clean presentation. Icons are often rendered sterile figures, free of vitality and humanity, and the stories we glean from their legacies are often reduced to casualty figures and simple morals. In the grand tradition of historical satirists, what they’ve done is remind us that behind many crowns lay two-pump chumps who petulantly shout “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” at foreign ambassadors (and yes, this is an actual line from the movie) and have an astonishing amount of trouble maintaining eye contact.
Many films have gone down the Despots! They’re Just Like Us! route, but few of them can preserve that acidity once they’ve crossed a certain budgetary threshold, and Napoleon is a particularly vicious and exciting example. And, sure enough, after watching an emperor make a familiar-feeling buffoon of himself for two hours and 40 minutes, the deluge does hit — Jesus Christ, how the hell could they ever let a moron like me near the levers of power? — and only horror follows.