A Bone Apart

The Ultimate Dad Movie has arrived in the form of Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon,’ and this dad, at least, left the theater feeling satisfied. I’ve waited most of my life to see a decent version of the Battle of Austerlitz, and also Waterloo, on screen. Scott stages those two sequences, which comprise up to a quarter of the film’s runtime, brilliantly. It’s like watching a game of Stratego come to life on screen, gory games of military chess realized at last.

Mileage may vary on Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of one of history’s most controversial figures. His Napoleon is enigmatic, pouty, selfish, and weird, consumed by his own ego, a man who says he wants peace but whose military campaigns led to the deaths of three million people, many of whom were soldiers under his command. He is comic, pathetic, almost anti-charismatic. His line “destiny has brought me this lamb chop” is about to spawn a million memes.

That is one of two all-time classic line deliveries from this movie. The other is where he exclaims, about the British, “You think you’re so great because you have BOATS!” Both brought the house down at my screening. The spaces between these lines is a lot of grim-lit strategizing and shots of Phoenix in his Napoleon uniform waddling up stairs. When he arrives at an abandoned Moscow, fooled by the Tzar, he sits and pouts in the emperor’s chair, bird poop drizzling on him from the rafters. That’s about the level of respect that Ridley Scott affords the Emperor.

Napoleon’s military misadventures comprise about half the movie. The rest involves his tortured love affair with the Empress Josephine, who shows him her “treasure” in an early meeting, leading him to obsess over it, and her, for the rest of her life while she takes lovers and occasionally weeps her way back into his affection. Vanessa Kirby is fantastic as Josephine, who we first see leaving the Bastille, looking wasted, after enduring the Reign of Terror by taking lovers to earn her bread. They have a bizarre, kinky, up-and-down relationship. We see a lot of Napoleon and Josephine sitting on couches at dawn, exchanging insults, like the Sid and Nancy of post-revolutionary France. Napoleon has basically one emotion: grumpy. Kirby’s Josephine spans multitudes, and she gives an intelligent, nuanced, sophisticated performance.

NAPOLEON  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: David Scarpa
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Rupert Everett, Edouard Philipponnat
Running time: 158 mins

‘Napoleon’ is both campy and serious, a little boring and very exciting, kind of kinky and also totally sexless. It’s as contradictory as Bonaparte himself. It either runs a bit long or it’s a bit short. I’m interesting to see what the four-hour version looks like when it appears on Apple TV in a few months. Will there be more battles? More boudoir? More Bastille liberation? A negotiation of the Napoleonic Codes? Or will Scott just give us more scenes of Napoleon talking about how much he likes to eat?

One thing I would like to see more of is Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington. Only in the movie’s final third do we finally get an actual antagonist for Bonaparte, though the young French actor who plays Tzar Alexander is also quite handsome and slippery. With Wellington, in the movie as in history, Bonaparte finally met his match. Wellington was a good-enough military strategist, and beyond that, he was just sick of Napoleon’s shit. Everett plays him as a flinty man with a grim sense of humor, who understands the irony of Europe existing for decades under the thumb of Bonaparte, a man who was either a genius, a clown, or both.

This is the best Napoleon movie that we’re going to ever get, so I’ll just luxuriate in it, whether I’m in exile or not. And take your Dad to see it. He’ll be able to tell you all about the Battle of Austerlitz. After ‘Napoleon,’ you’ll be able to tell your kids, too, though it might take a while to explain to them why the man in the weird hat was so very horny.