![]() ![]() Though Josephine died seven years before him, she gets the last word in this telling - not that anyone would mistake this for being her movie. Scott tracks Napoleon’s career from his days as a promising young officer who witnessed the guillotining of Marie Antoinette (one of Scarpa’s many poetic licenses) to his exile on the island of St. ![]() Here, he takes a step back, embracing the widescreen format and filming as Abel Gance (in the three-screen finale of his 1927 silent “Napoleon”) and Sergei Bondarchuk (for his Soviet-era “War and Peace” epic) did: letting an entire battlefield fill the frame, surveyed from on high by Napoleon himself, who stands stoically, communicating his orders with as little as a head nod at times. But every time she appears on-screen, it distracts from the film’s main selling point: expansive, cast-of-hundreds combat scenes that prove both Napoleon’s keen military strategy and Scott’s gift for staging such clashes.įrom the modern Mogadishu firefight in “Black Hawk Down” to the 12th-century siege of Jerusalem in “Kingdom of Heaven,” Scott has ample experience with plunging audiences into intense immersive warfare. Theirs is a great passion, to the extent that Napoleon abandons his mission in Egypt to sail home and confront Josephine when he learns of liaisons she’s been entertaining in his absence. As written by David Scarpa, “Napoleon” tilts much of the attention away from its title character and toward the man’s wife, Josephine de Beauharnais ( Vanessa Kirby). Those stories expand audiences’ horizons, whereas “Napoleon” replays what we already know.īoth Scott and Phoenix embrace a touch of camp, portraying the enigma that was Napoleon as a petulant brat-cum-military genius: someone who knew how to get his way on the battlefield, but resorted to food fights at home. It’s the opposite of recent films like “Chevalier” and “Jeanne du Barry,” which plumb the footnotes of history to find overlooked heroes. But times are not the same, and though Scott is wise to which way the wind blows (he demonstrated as much in his underrated medieval-reckoning movie “The Last Duel”), he’s less sure about how best to position such a biopic for a moment fed up with power-hungry patriarchs. Here, from the master of the modern epic, comes an undeniably impressive technical achievement: a bombastic old-school “great man” movie of the sort that dominated Hollywood in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The director’s motives are unclear, much like those of Napoleon Bonaparte, as played by Joaquin Phoenix, who gives a mumbly and oddly anti-charismatic performance as the figure - short, slender and something of an outsider, owing to his Corsican birth - who came to rule France after the revolution. A chyron that appears at the end of “ Napoleon” - after two and a half hours of turgid, grime-encrusted spectacle - informs that France’s self-anointed emperor oversaw 61 battles, listing the six that director Ridley Scott opted to stage for our benefit … or for his own glory. ![]()
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