'Napoleon' is a Messy Rebuke to the 'Great Man' Theory of History

Ridley Scott's epic is a memorable, gloriously gory, and unexpectedly hilarious portrait of Napoleon's relationship, but still feels a little incomplete.

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Sony Pictures

One of History’s Foremost ‘Great Men’ is Perhaps Its Ultimate ‘Weird Little Guy’

I can’t decide whether Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is too short or mismarketed; probably both. The posters for Napoleon promise “He came from nothing… he conquered everything,” which is a slick tagline, but nothing like the movie — in which Napoleon’s origins are only ever hinted at and whose conquests are mostly relegated to background noise. Mostly this is a film about an awkward little man and his weirdly touching, life-long love affair with a woman who never quite takes him seriously.

To be taken seriously is most of what Napoleon wants and Josephine is often his main obstacle to it. That he knows this and loves her in spite of it curses him to step on the rake again and again, making her both his greatest source of joy and his greatest source of shame. Ah, l’amour!

It’s an intriguing portrait, but far from a complete one. And it does make you wonder if there are three other solid movies still on the cutting room floor. I could’ve used at least 35 more minutes of Rupert Everett as the fusty, disgustingly British Duke of Wellington, for instance. Making me wish there was more of a two hour and 38-minute movie is an achievement all its own but it’s true: some of the ideas in Napoleon feel like they’re missing the connections a few more scenes might’ve actually improved.

Ridley Scott is at his sumptuous best depicting the fractious time from which sprang Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) and his future love, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). The two meet cute during one of Paris’s “Survivor’s Balls,” during the hedonistic period set in the immediate aftermath of the Reign of Terror. As a performer onstage pretends to copulate with Marie Antonette’s (fake) severed head (her actual guillotining at the hands of an angry mob is the film’s first scene), Napoleon spies Josephine from across the room — her head still shorn from her recent imprisonment, wearing a ribbon around her neck as a mock guillotine wound, her breasts squished together and spilling almost all the way out of her dress in the fashion of the period. It’s a funhouse mirror take on Romeo and Juliet, in which somehow the crass surroundings only highlight the stupid innocence of attraction. Napoleon is intrigued, but there’s nothing particularly special in that—it doesn’t take a rare visionary to be captivated by exposed breasts. (Huurrr, I like when can almost see nipple, you can practically hear Napoleon thinking).

Josephine, a widowed aristocrat comfortable in this debauched milieau, walks over to ask why the socially inept soldier is staring at her before complimenting his “costume.” “This is my uniform,” answers the bemused Napoleon. “I am the hero of Toulon.”

The scene is a perfect, strange echo of the “OR scrubs” scene from Rushmore and basically foreshadows their entire relationship — Josephine finding this self-serious little toy soldier man slightly exotic and endearingly pathetic; Napoleon mystified as to what it’s going to take to actually impress this woman. He confuses the intensity of his one-way horniness for some chivalric ideal.

Scott has another doozy in store for their consummation: Josephine upright in a chair, Napoleon on his knees gazing into her vagina like it’s the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. “Once you have it, you will always desire it,” she huskily deadpans, like a witch reciting an incantation.

Once again the scene is pure invention, but conveys an important truth about their dynamic — Napoleon, otherwise an ambitious social striver, was hopelessly in thrall to this sexually sophisticated older woman who could bring him neither money nor status and was known to get around, simply for the primal feelings she inspired in him. That he knew she was bad for him and didn’t care makes it strangely romantic, in some sense of the word.

Josephine lays her cards on the table at the beginning of the relationship, admitting to Napoleon that she had been the wife of an executed aristocrat who had many affairs, the mistress of powerful men herself, and that she carried a general’s bastards in prison mostly to avoid the guillotine. “Will that be problem for you?” she asks.

“…No,” says Napoleon, never one to elaborate on a point.

His powerlessness to Josephine’s sort-of obvious charms (she has her boobs out; she’s good in bed) are what humanize Napoleon, and Joaquin Phoenix makes a meal of the scenes where Napoleon acts most like an angry little boy. “You think you’re so great just because you have boats!” he sputters at a British diplomat in probably the film’s funniest moment.

The film’s most affecting scene, meanwhile, sees Josephine, her marriage annulled from Napoleon after she fails to bear him a child (presumably the after effects of her multiple pregnancies in prison, which Napoleon said he didn’t care about), meet with Napoleon, who has come to show her his recently delivered heir with his second wife. “You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed for you,” Josephine whispers to the newborn who, in a different world, might’ve been hers.

The line lands hard. The film succeeds masterfully in humanizing this woman, a profligate lover who doesn’t especially respect the husband she married mostly out of convenience, who so easily could’ve been a villain. She isn’t though; just a survivor trying to play the hand she’s been dealt. Vanessa Kirby is frankly far too British for the role (was Lea Seydoux unavailable?) but the performance is on point.

Meanwhile, Phoenix’s casting alone does a lot of heavy lifting. “Napoleone Buonaparte,” (in his original styling of it), was a Corsican whose first language was a form of Italian, who only belatedly embraced his Frenchness when it became politically expedient for him, and who always spoke with an accent (at his wedding, he doctored his birthdate so that it matched the day France officially took control of Corsica). The movie understandably doesn’t really have time to get into all that, but in casting a cleft-palated, slump shouldered American surrounded by Brits, it does manage to convey some of Napoleon’s brusque outsider qualities without spelling them out.

In an era when all of our leading politicians and all of our most powerful robber-barons seem pretty much universally to be weird little guys, Napoleon is a stick in the eye of the Great Man theory of history, depicting one of history’s consummate Great Men as the ultimate Weird Little Guy. Napoleon’s seeming indifference to death, his intuitive ambition, his terse decisiveness and unfailing personal confidence (then as now making people think he knows what he’s doing even when he doesn’t) all make him perfect for this moment. France was desperate for someone to make some firm decisions, right or wrong, and Napoleon, while he often screwed up, never waffled. Scott and Scarpa depict him as neither brilliant prodigy nor mindless tyrant. Their Napoleon character perhaps explains himself best, to his British captors after Waterloo. “I was always good at geometry,” he says, shrugging while tucking into his breakfast.

In the New Yorker’s recent profile of Ridley Scott, Napoleon screenwriter David Scarpa describes his and Scott’s “aha” moment as when they realized that Napoleon has “a split personality”: as a hyper-competent, pitiless battlefield general, but also a bumbling, devoted cuckold. That, both he and Scott say, was their way in. Yet while they articulate Napoleon’s bumbling devotedness beautifully, whoever battlefield Napoleon actually was remains a little remote.

Scott certainly seems fascinated with Napoleon’s battles, in a Dads-Who-Love-WWII-Shows kind of way, but he has a tendency to get so lost in the flourishes of his own imagery that he sometimes forgets to convey the larger picture. Sometimes this impressionistic approach really works, such as in Scott’s staging of the Battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon tricks his opponents into charging onto frozen ponds, then entombs them by pounding those ponds with artillery. It’s a well-told anecdote and perfectly cinematic, a worthy companion to the opening flaming arrow battle in Gladiator, if not quite up there with the giant-sticks sequence in Braveheart (one of the most well-told battle scenes in all of cinema).

But it’s a notable exception. Waterloo has some compelling imagery — the British infantry forming into squares with bayonets facing outward, while the French cavalry circle them — but largely fails to congeal into a coherent story. Why did Napoleon lose? What actually went wrong? What were Wellington’s keys to victory? Simple stuff, perhaps, but it matters when you’re trying to create a larger portrait.

This was a confusing time period, when everyone was seemingly at war all the time and alliances were made and broken every 12 hours. The movie’s version still feels like a bit of a dodge, not even really attempting to contextualize. “Oh yeah, we made it confusing because it takes place in a confusing time.” Sure?

Even the split-personality read itself seems a bit of a copout. Yes, it does seem striking that Napoleon seemed far more capable at leading an army and knowing the perfect time to seize political power than he did at trying to control the woman he loved (or understanding her motivations). But isn’t reconciling that split personality part of the storyteller’s job? Could it be that Napoleon’s romanticized, neoclassical, pseudo-chivalric worldview played a lot better in speeches to troops and ultimatums to rival generals than it did across a bed or a dinner table? Maybe it’s easier to bullshit other warriors than it is to bullshit a woman who’s been around the block.

It’s still a touching moment when Napoleon returns from his first exile on Elba and the soldiers sent to arrest him end up lowering their rifles and shouting “Long live the Emperor!” You can’t help getting a little misty as they rush to embrace this weird little guy, his big gamble paying off, at least for a while.

Napoleon is brilliant at exploring why Josephine thought Napoleon was slightly absurd, but it mostly fails to explore why his soldiers thought he was worth dying for. I suspect that might be somewhere in an edit, but not the one that made it to theaters. If Apple ever gets around to releasing that four-hour director’s cut Ridley Scott is promising I’ll definitely be watching it.

Grade: B

Other notes:

-Historical context helps a lot. For a GQ piece I asked four Napoleon experts for the best recommendations of Napoleon-related content and they delivered.