Ridley Scott made his directorial debut with The Duellists back in 1977, set during the Napoleonic Wars, and now returns to that period of history nearly half a century later with his latest feature. Focusing on the small man behind the big conflicts, Napoleon sees Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role for the story of the emperor’s epic rise and fall. Written by screenwriter David Scarpa, his military exploits are woven into the turbulent tale of his marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), providing a study of the controversial character away from the brutality of the battlefield.
Opening with the beheading of Queen Marie Antoinette amid the French Revolution, the film takes its audience on a historical whistlestop tour of the protagonist’s key battles across the weighty running time, from the Siege of Toulon in 1793 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. A feat of action choreography is on display, and we certainly get a sense of his talent as a skilled war tactician; an icy massacre in Austerlitz is the most impressive sequence of the lot. However, shot with the dreich overcast of a wet weekend, the greyness strips away a lot of the colour, and subsequently some of the spectacle. His marital drama is more compelling, with the narrative leaning into the infamous insecurities around his stature that led him to have an inferiority complex in his name. A surprising amount of humour comes from the way in which the script pokes fun at his personality; we see him portrayed as petulant and pathetic, almost seen as a laughing stock to his adversaries in moments, so this offers up a stark juxtaposition against his ruthlessness as a leader.
Putting his age to one side alongside some other glaring inaccuracies, Joaquin Phoenix is well cast as Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s his first film with Ridley Scott since playing the sulky yet psychotic Commodus in Gladiator and there are some similarities in this performance. He has the range to embody a fierce dictator and an emotionally vulnerable misfit, and this role gives him the golden opportunity to do both very well. Vanessa Kirby is great in her crafty twist on the long-suffering wife archetype, even if the writing fails to capture the arc of the real Josephine who was actually six years older than her husband.
In the closing chapters of his illustrious career and more prolific than ever, director Ridley Scott presents the type of old fashioned biopic that feels like it’s gone out of favour of late, but it works as a character study due to the tyrannical central performance. Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar a few years ago for his version of the Joker, but this is arguably a more interesting portrait of a mentally unstable clown.
Cinema Perspective 