Napoleon (2023)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Waterloo Bugaboo

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Cinephiles know that legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick once planned on making a film about Napoleon Bonaparte. They also know that Kubrick and director Ridley Scott knew each other.

Now Scott's own version of Napoleon arrives Wednesday in San Francisco theaters, and it's apparent that if Kubrick had any special advice on the topic, he never gave it to Scott.

Scott has been and still could be a great filmmaker (see Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise), but his new two-and-a-half-hour epic is as rudimentary and as passionless as Cliff's Notes. It's akin to a bored professor giving a droning, monotone lecture.

As in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, there are many, many secondary or supporting characters that pop up and disappear like whack-a-moles. Most are briefly introduced, and then vanish for a while, only to re-emerge again maybe a half hour or 45 minutes later.

Frankly, for anyone who is not a Napoleon scholar, it's difficult to keep track of all the names and dates and places, especially as events leap forward years at a time. It's a memory card game with little chance of winning.

The movie begins in 1793 — thankfully avoiding Napoleon's childhood — as Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) goes to the guillotine.

As she walks to her death, an angry crowd throws food, which sticks in her voluminous, curly hair. Then, head, hair, and food must be maneuvered into the hollow of the guillotine for the fatal chop.

This, weirdly, is the movie's most inspired sequence, and the only time Scott seems to be having any fun.

The rest of the film ticks off check-boxes. Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) rises through the ranks of the French military, goes to war, becomes emperor, gains allies, loses allies, regains allies, is eventually defeated at Waterloo, and finally exiled on the island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.

Many viewers will pay to see the many battlefield sequences with their mud, blood, horses, flags, spyglasses, swords, rifles, lances, and cannons — the cannonballs here explode like miniature atomic bombs — but the scenes blur together. There's little to distinguish one from another.

At the film's center, we have Phoenix, who, most can agree, is a fine actor. Phoenix does fine things with Napoleon, showing his lust for power, his self-assurance, as well as his baser emotions.

It's a rounded performance, even incorporating some moments of humor — let's hope the line "DESTINY led me to this lamb chop!!!" becomes a meme — but not necessarily among Phoenix's deepest or most affecting work.

Where Napoleon comes briefly alive is in the casting and performance of Vanessa Kirby — herself a recent Oscar nominee for Pieces of a Woman — as Napoleon's wife Josephine.

This character might have been little more than window decoration, but Kirby brings flash and fire to the role, easily the equal of Phoenix. Their scenes together are the only ones that have any spark, perhaps because the performers each feed off of the energy of their sparring partner.

It's a shame that Napoleon is such a drudgery. In the past decades, when studios learned that biographies are catnip for Oscars, it has become clear that the best ones, Bennett Miller's Capote or Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, for example, focus on a single, important event in the subject's life.

The ones that try to cram an entire life into the length of a movie tend to end up like Napoleon, with scene after scene describing to us what happened, without ever getting into the poetry of it, and without time for nuance.

Ironically, if Scott's film could have gone on longer, he might have ended up with something truly magnificent and spectacular, like Abel Gance's silent-era Napoleon, released in 1927, and restored to a five-and-a-half-hour running time in 2012.

That movie was so inventive and intoxicating that it has endured for nearly a century. Conversely, the most interesting thing about Scott's Napoleon is the tidbit that, apparently, the emperor had a talent for falling asleep while standing or sitting up.

Quite a few ticket-buyers will likely have that in common with him.