To appreciate film at the tail end of A.D. 2023 is to, in part, appreciate an octogenarian master of the craft who can examine and interrogate cultural and historical touchstones and still find something new to say.
I could, of course, be talking about Martin Scorsese, but you already know that I am not. I could also be trying to stoke controversy, I suppose. Again, I am not. What I am attempting, instead, is a bit of an awareness campaign. Marty, that champion of cinema, deserves the plaudits he is receiving. There is room for two is the thing.
Scott’s Napoleon, currently enjoying a run in the theaters before it lands on Apple TV+, has all the trappings of a serious political history. It is a gray-blue spectacle that, greatest-hits style, chronicles the titular character’s most famous military exploits as he ascends from artillery-focused middle manager to emperor. From Egypt to Austerlitz to Moscow, it covers the territory you’d expect from a biopic about one of history’s most famous generals. And, very superficially, that’s what you’d expect from the director who made Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Robin Hood, not messing about with the basic conceit and construct of sweeping historical epics in the process.
Napoleon is all the things those other films are from afar, and almost nothing like them up close. Joaquin Phoenix’s Bonaparte is, delightfully, a sniveling toddler for the entirety of the film. It’s shocking and disorienting at first, then riotously funny, before finally settling in as horrifying.
Phoenix’s portrayal of Bonaparte never really goes beyond I’m-a-big-boy-mommy-look-at-all-my-boom-booms even as he piles up military triumphs and accumulates political power. He expresses sexual attraction by howling like a dog. He’s exactly as eloquent as a 3-year-old when expressing his frustration at English naval superiority.
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Over and over again, the camera is trained on him plugging his ears as his precious cannons are fired at an enemy. He exudes the confidence of someone who thinks a monster lives under his bed, and needs his parents to check there every night.
Apparently, all of this made French historians mad. To me at least, that matters exactly as much as what Neil DeGrasse Tyson thought of Interstellar or The Martian, which is to say not at all.
Perhaps it’s an obvious point to make, but a film about Napoleon should not give us our history, but instead examine our relationship with a figure that looms so large in our history books. Lest you had any doubt of that as the film winds to its conclusion - as you ponder what Scott is trying to tell us with this arrested-development version of Bonaparte - he closes with the death totals from Napoleon’s most famous battles. This has been fun and funny and weird and a spectacle, but here’s a bleak reminder of the real human cost wrought by this so-called Great Man.
One of the most interesting parts of all of this is that it is Scott that has chosen to say this in this particular way. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Just last year, Scott covered this territory from a slightly different angle in The Last Duel.
That film is vastly more sober and, though set in an era that captures the historical imagination similarly, doesn’t cover a character that we all know so well. All the same, it twirls perspective like light passing through prism. We spend part of the film thinking of Matt Damon’s character as a hard-luck everyman and Adam Driver’s as an elitist cad. We spend the next part seeing Damon as a crude oaf and Driver as a sinister predator. We’re never really sure which portrayal is true.
Napoleon feels like a natural continuation of this point, or perhaps a coda of sorts. In the final few scenes after Bonaparte is beaten at Waterloo, we are treated to Phoenix holding court with teenaged English midshipmen on the ship that will take him to St. Helena, the final island to which he was exiled. They are rapt. He made the big booms-booms, after all, and, for us boys, there’s a part of us that will always be impressed by the boom-booms. Next, just before he dies, we watch him lie about his exploits to two pre-teen girls.
No matter how old we get, Scott seems to be saying, we remain susceptible to these child-like moments of wonder. What separates childhood from adulthood is the parts where we, as adults, ask some hard questions about why our imagination has been so captured.