An Enjoyable Extravaganza About … Napoleon?

When it comes to battle tactics, Napoleon Bonaparte (as played by Joaquin Phoenix) is very gun forward. There are few conflicts he marches into that don’t involve the firing of many cannons, an instinct befitting his status as an artillery commander in the French military—the organization he quickly transcended to become the leader of his country by the age of 30. But it also mirrors his rash, preening, sometimes awkward charm in Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, a biography that fast-forwards through the major events of Napoleon’s life and presents him as equal parts confident and arrogant, making for a roller coaster of the ego that’s surprisingly full of laughs.

Making a movie about Napoleon is the kind of consuming effort that drives even the greatest filmmakers to ruin. Stanley Kubrick spent half of his career trying to make a Napoleon and never succeeded; the best-regarded biopic remains a 1927 silent epic that runs more than five hours and ends well before Napoleon becomes the ruler of France. But even though Napoleon’s life story is grand enough to have stumped auteurs such as Kubrick, Scott has tackled that challenge with his usual workmanlike bravado, churning out another enjoyable extravaganza to go along with recent period pieces such as The Last Duel and House of Gucci.

At the age of 85, Scott seems almost pathologically disinterested in slowing down. Always prolific, he’s made eight feature films in the past 10 years—nearly all of them on the largest scale possible, including the misguided biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings and the ripping sci-fi yarns The Martian and Alien: Covenant. Shot through most of these films is a very healthy contempt for humanity, especially the rich and powerful variety; his vision of the Guccis was of a family poisoned by their wealth, and his later Alien films were practically cheering for the space beasts to tear everyone apart. Scott’s tendency toward disdain probably made him a helpful choice for a Napoleon biopic that runs a tight two hours and 38 minutes, presenting a sample platter of big battles, focusing on Napoleon’s bristling insecurities, and cheerfully cutting everything else.

Scott has promised that an extended version will debut on Apple TV+ someday, but I think the abridged version works—Napoleon gives viewers a quick sense of the man’s nervy vibe and then plunges them into the tremendous depths of his martial exploits. In that regard, Phoenix is a perfect avatar for Scott to play with. He’s an actor with unbelievable presence, and one of his funniest, most colorful performances came in Scott’s Gladiator, in which he played the Roman Emperor Commodus as a sniveling, uncharismatic failson desperate for his crowd’s approval.

[Read: Ridley Scott still makes movies for adults. Thank goodness.]

Phoenix’s Napoleon is a little more self-assured—but only a little. He is a man who is able to back up his petty boasts with his cannons (at least for a short while), yet he still bleats things like “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” at an English ambassador. The film begins with Napoleon impressing his superiors at the Siege of Toulon, developing true patriotic fervor in the violent years following the French Revolution. Soon enough, Napoleon is bouncing into leadership positions, both by exploiting the power vacuum and by coasting on his ever-expanding ego. Phoenix cannot help but play the wounded child behind the eyes, delivering a performance that feels like a surprising cousin to his excellent work in this year’s Beau Is Afraid.

David Scarpa’s script frequently alludes to Napoleon’s mother, who dominates her son’s attention before he switches his focus to a new figure: Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), his first wife, who becomes a figure of endless obsession. Kirby is somewhat fundamentally miscast here, given that she’s 14 years younger than Phoenix and the real Joséphine was older than Napoleon, but considering Scott’s apathy regarding historical accuracy, I’ll forgive it. Kirby certainly has a menacing, seductive air, playing Joséphine as a fallen aristocrat who’s completely assured of her appeal and desperate to survive in revolutionary France. Her relationship with Napoleon is at times opportunistic, but their connection is real, and Phoenix relishes tapping into his sad-puppy energy, trying desperately to satisfy one woman even as his country rallies around him.

Their epically dysfunctional partnership is the emotional through line of Napoleon—but this is a Ridley Scott movie, so the bulk of the action comes in the battles, with masterfully staged sequences replicating noted showdowns at Austerlitz and Waterloo. How Scott is able to pump out these grandiose set pieces with such practiced ease (and a little CGI embellishment) is beyond me; he remains one of Hollywood’s finest craftsmen of action sequences, and I’ll miss him when he’s gone. As long as he wants to make them, I’ll happily snap up biopics such as these, which care equally about the visual backdrops and the characters in front of them.