Revisiting Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon': Disaster or Something Better?
Historical accuracy isn't always something to shoot for.
Every time I turn on my Apple TV, the home screen begs me to select the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.” With 45 minutes of new footage, it’s a supposed reimagining of a film that didn’t receive much critical kindness when it came out last year. And yet, despite my fondness for military history, directors’ unimpeded visions and pint-sized egomaniacs, I always decline Apple TV’s generous offer. There’s too little time to allow every director a do-over, even if I thought the theatrical cut was unfairly maligned.
Ridley Scott caught a lot of flak for the liberties he took with Napoleon’s history, particularly the battles. I don’t think he deserved it. Nation-level battles of the 18th and 19th century were fiendishly complex affairs involving tens of thousands of people; you’d need to devote a three-hour movie to a single one to even begin doing it justice. On top of that, lines of men in uniform firing upon other lines can quickly become monotonous; if you gave me a choice between watching paint dry for eight hours or re-watching Bondarchuck’s “Waterloo” (1970), I’d probably ask if I could pick the paint color.
Scott is a smart director and realized all of this, and so he opted to go for pacing and exciting visuals rather than accuracy, which is why you get scenes like Napoleon at Austerlitz ordering his cannons to bombard a frozen lake in the middle of the battle, sending thousands of surprised Russians to a freezing, watery grave. Such events didn’t really happen that way, or at all—but Scott makes sure it plays well visually, all color and thunder and rising orchestras. Historical inaccuracy may make the historians grind their teeth, but it can be beautiful.
Scott’s also very capable of claiming historical accuracy when it suits his purposes. I remember attending a press junket many years ago for “Kingdom of Heaven,” another of his historical epics that received a critical drubbing and a lengthier director’s cut. An elderly reporter in the audience stood up and asked, in a tremulous voice, why Scott had to make his film so gosh-darn violent?
You could sense Scott keeping his volcanic temper in check. I imagined a scrum of studio PR reps just backstage, tensed and puckered, ready to rush forward and terminate the junket before it dissolved into crusades-level bloodshed.
“Because that’s the way it happened,” Scott said, deceptively placid, before moving to the next question.
Movies aren’t the best venue for accuracy, anyway; it’s all subjective reality, expensive illusions masquerading as fact. The historically inaccurate movie trusts that you’ll treat it as just that—a movie—and head to the library afterwards with all due haste; in a certain backhanded way, it’s respectful of your capacity to peel fact from legend. But even with that in mind, I can’t deal with Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Napoleon, which is the main thing that prevents me from watching it again.
Phoenix deciding to play Napoleon as a weird, dour little man is certainly a choice. He’s anti-charisma, the polar opposite of a magnetic leader. Maybe the performance is meant as meta-commentary on how all strongmen are, deep down, just weak runts unsuited for normal company… but The Autocrat as Circus Geek doesn’t make for compelling viewing.
As I watched the film the first time around, I wondered if the longstanding British hatred of Napoleon had influenced Scott to ask Phoenix to act in such an odd manner. More than two hundred years after the French slammed their dear leader into his hilariously oversized coffin, a subset of Britons just can’t seem to let the whole matter rest; I have a two-volume biography of Napoleon on my shelf whose back copy claims its British author doesn’t hold the same grudge as his fellow countrymen when it comes to Le Petit Corporal, for instance. Perhaps it’s hatred bound up in nostalgia for lost empire, but that’s a matter for a nation’s headshrinker.
Anyway, is Phoenix’s performance at the helm of a $200 million movie meant as yet another nail in Napoleon’s proverbial coffin from a very British director? Humorous if so. But I think there’s something more postmodern going on here.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of the anti-protagonist, the antithesis of the stalwart hero who used to dominate movie screens. This character, so long a staple of indie filmmaking, seems to have become the focus of ever-bigger budgets and tentpole features, their sweaty mumbling and neurotic meltdowns captured in IMAX. I’m thinking of Tom Hardy in pretty much everything, but especially the entertainingly dumb “Venom” flicks; Phoenix again in “Joker”; even Malika Monroe in “Longlegs,” twitchy and perpetually panicked, literally the last FBI agent you’d ever want to trust with a gun. Putting on my headshrinker’s hat, I might say the anti-protagonist is a reflection of our increasingly weird, uncertain times; there’s no space here for the old heroes. With his performance, Phoenix might have been embracing this trend… but he didn’t do the actual Napoleon any favors.