Napoleon

By Joanna Langfield

It certainly isn’t perfect, but, to answer the question director Ridley Scott has asked before, yes, I was entertained.

Don’t come to this audacious epic looking for a fully explanative biography. This behemoth leaves out chucks of story. But what it does, it does with a big, make that huge, budget and lust. As we’ve seen, Scott knows how to film a battle. And what battle scenes he stages here. Old school action, up close and personal. And a scene involving ice that did, indeed, give me goosebumps.

And then there’s the rest of it. The relationship between Napoleon and Josephine has been written and filmed before, yet Scott chooses to make it almost a complete counterpoint to the gargantuan war scenes, taking up maybe half the picture. And, maybe Bonaparte’s complicated love life was an understandable balance to his savvy leadership on the battlefield. I choose to think the focus is also a salute to Vanessa Kirby’s performance, which is sly and pretty nifty.

And then there’s Joaquin Phoenix, who brings an almost hilarious take to the legendary leader. Whining and often monosyllabic, Phoenix presents Napoleon as a man/child, a testosterone bullet content to submit to his wife’s manipulations. It’s not just this take on the man that made me laugh. I also couldn’t believe that, while all the other actors around him at least adopt some kind of clipped accent, if it isn’t natural to them, Phoenix ignores all that, speaking, when he does, in a kind of Midwest plains flatness. Maybe Phoenix was tapping a bit of Napoleon himself, doing it his way, no matter what.

Is it an accident that two of our most celebrated veteran directors, Scott and Scorsese, both in their 80s, are delivering two of the year’s most ambitious sagas, both looking back at complicated periods of our history? I think not. But I also think their work continues to inspire. And that’s pretty epic onto itself.