(Napoleon is available free on Apple TV.)
Brian Cox, the star of Succession, recently said that Joaquin Phoenix, the star, was totally responsible for Napoleon being so bad:
“It’s terrible,” Cox said of the film. “A truly terrible performance by Joaquin Phoenix. It really is appalling. I don’t know what he was thinking. I think it’s totally his fault and I don’t think Ridley Scott helps him. I would have played it a lot better than Joaquin Phoenix, I tell you that. You can say it’s good drama. No — it’s lies.”
A reviewer in Le Figaro said the movie should have been named, "Barbie and Ken Under the Empire." Ouch. But it is a movie about his relationship with Josephine to the exclusion of almost everything else, except some exciting battles.
There are lots of articles pointing out the historical inaccuracies in the movie (like this), and I know Ridley Scott (the director) doesn’t care about those at all. But let’s take a few anyway.
Napoleon was not present at Marie Antoinette’s guillotining.
He did not shoot off the tops of the Pyramids.
The Battle of Austerlitz was not fought primarily on a frozen lake.
He did not slap Josephine at the annulment ceremony.
Wellington and Napoleon never met,
Historical Movies
Scott’s defense of Napoleon is “it’s a movie, not a documentary.” If you’ve ever read a book and then seen the movie, you know that they can’t get in everything, and “cinematic license” excuses a lot of sins.
However, let’s compare Napoleon to another eponymously titled movie: Lincoln. It’s fair to say that Americans generally worship Abraham Lincoln, as much or more than French people love Napoleon. Lincoln also stars an actor of a different nationality than the subject (Daniel Day-Lewis is English / Irish), so it’s not that Joaquin Phoenix isn’t French.
Suppose Lincoln gave only passing mention to the Civil War and the fight against slavery, and concentrated on Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln’s rocky relationship? They did lose a son, after all, so why not make a movie out of that? That’s what Napoleon does with Josephine.
Or: suppose a French director made a movie about Lincoln, starring a French actor, and the movie showed him fighting in the Mexican War and publicly opposing slavery right from his boyhood? After all, he did free the slaves eventually. “It’s a movie, not a documentary” they could say, “and no one cares about all those details.” U.S. audiences would be unamused. We can’t expect the French to be amused at Napoleon.
The fault is in the script, and I don’t know whether it’s the producer who’s at fault or Mr. Scott, but no actor could have salvaged this mess of a movie. Not even Brian Cox (who’s too old for the part anyway).
Other Historical Movies
Apollo 13
Apollo 13 was a wonderful and very successful movie. There are, of course, many inaccuracies in it, e.g. “Houston, we have a problem” was never said in reality. But as this article says,
While it may be easy for filmmakers to play with facts, Ron Howard committed to portraying events in Apollo 13 as true to life as he could, which many experts agree that he did. NASA planetary scientist Rick Elphic "posits that Apollo 13 might be one of the most accurate, especially when it came to the science of space travel" (via Time).
Not only did Apollo 13 get the science right, but the film accurately portrayed the events of the real space disaster by adhering to the timeline as recorded in Jim Lovell's book. Beyond that, the filmmakers and set designers went to great effort to recreate the space capsule and command center's actual environment. Lovell told The New York Times, "It's really amazing. Everything. The instrument panels, the console switches. That's exactly what it looks like inside."
Ron Howard made an effort. Ridley Scott and his scriptwriter did not.
Master and Commander
Just in time for me to mention it, this article came out comparing Napoleon to a far superior movie about the same era, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander.
Just like Lincoln didn’t try to explore his whole life but rather, concentrated on the 13th Amendment, a focused movie about one incident in Napoleon’s life would have been a much more successful effort:
Master and Commander proves that, instead of trying to tell Napoleon's story in a single movie, the best way to reveal deep truths about his character and make him a believable protagonist is to concentrate on a specific period. Scott's film could have emulated Weir's movie and followed Napoleon's journey during the French Revolution, or delved into the siege of Toulon, or his legendary Russian campaign. Ironically, in trying to cover everything, the film failed to explain almost anything about his motives and nature. As Master and Commander proved, the Napoleonic era demands specificity instead of generality.
His Rise to Power
The recapture of Toulon from the British is, well… reasonable for a movie. Of course it was more complicated than the movie makes it out to be, and the directing is, indeed, Ridley Scott-esque in its action sequences. But hey, it’s a movie. So I don’t object to that. The “whiff of grapeshot” that dispersed the Royalist mob: that’s in there and it’s well done.
Josephine
The movie is all about his romance with her. If it were titled “Napoleon and Josephine,” that might be fine, but it’s not. So we have a right to see something about what he did besides have sex with her.
Their marriage was in 1796. The movie goes from that directly to the Pyramids. His Egyptian expedition, though, was in 1798, two years later, and it was aimed directly at England, for whom Egypt was critical. Yet although that’s mentioned, it’s only in his letter to Josephine.
Nelson and the Royal Navy destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, but all the military misadventures in the Middle East don’t matter at all in this movie; only that Napoleon suspects she’s being unfaithful to him (as she was). When he comes back to Paris, all he cares about is her. She makes him say, “I am just a brute that is nothing without you.”
They’re crowned Emperor and Empress. At dinner he publicly says that she’s had other lovers, and yet she’s still not pregnant. They have a food fight in front of the guests. Then he comes to her bed.
A Whirlwind Tour of His Career, Sort Of
Now we’re at Austerlitz. He still writes to Josephine and tells her he misses her warmth. The French win the battle, of course, and the disputed drownings of men on the frozen lake is shown in full Ridley Scott glory. But again: hey, this is a movie so we’ll excuse that.
But immediately, he’s back with Josephine again. Her handlers set up an A-B test to determine whose fault it is that she can’t get pregnant: he has sex with another woman, to see if she gets pregnant. She does, therefore it’s Josephine’s fault, therefore he must dump her. This takes up multiple minutes of screen time, including the marriage “annulment” and her exile. The annulment was in 1810. Was there nothing happening between 1805 and then?
Anyway, he visits her in her exile, we have a brief tête-à-tête between Napoleon and the Russian Czar on their mutual hatred of England, and then it’s back to his romantic life. He marries Marie-Louise, and then, nine months later, she bears him a son. Then it’s back to Josephine’s place of exile to show her the new baby. Why he would do this, I have no idea.
Then he writes to her again, explaining that now he has to invade Russia. The Battle of Borodino takes up about 60 seconds of screen time. He advances to Moscow, finds it deserted, and is puzzled when it gets burned to the ground. The army retreats to Poland, and again we have the letters between him and Josephine. “Fortune has deserted me,” he says, as the troops starve, fall sick, and get attacked by Cossacks. Their suffering doesn’t prevent him from deserting them and returning to Paris.
We skip straight from there to his exile to Elba, which actually happened in April 1814. Two more critical years missing.
War and Peace, in almost any of its movie versions, tells the story from the Russian side, much, much better. General Kutusov’s brilliant strategy to let the vastness of Russia defeat Napoleon is not mentioned at all.
He returns from Elba, naturally to see Josephine, who dies of diptheria before he can reach her. The English and Prussians join to defeat him again at Waterloo (and this battle scene is sensational).
What’s Missing?
Maybe you see the movie and wonder, “Hey, did Napoleon do anything besides win battles and screw Josephine?”
Well, yes. Like:
Changing the art of war. His brilliant use of artillery and maneuver changed military thinking forever. However…
Losing the Battles of Trafalgar and Leipzig, which were kinda strategic. Losing the Peninsular War in Spain, which, ironically, Wellington played a key part in (in the movie, he magically appears at Waterloo).
His legal code, still in use in many parts of the world.
The metric system, which he helped spread.
The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States.
The Louvre, which had been a palace and he made into one of the world’s premier art galleries.
The End of the Holy Roman Empire
Napoleon as a Person
My friend Margaret Rodenberg who wrote Finding Napoleon, said;
What I most disliked about the movie is that it portrays Napoleon as an unthinking automaton in war and a silly jerk in love. He is a fascinating character who was Shakespearean in his flaws and his genius.
The movie ignores the depth of his character and his accomplishments which were beyond the battlefield. It’s a shame because no one will make another Napoleon movie for a long time. A missed opportunity to show the depth and breadth of a monumental leader—however you judge him in the final balance.
This is maybe the closest to what Brian Cox was getting at, and while Joaquin Phoenix was certainly guilty of portraying him “as an unthinking automaton in war and a silly jerk in love,” I’ve tried to show that the script and the editing combined to force it on him. Unfortunately, we’ve seen him in Joker and he’s not the kind of actor, like Alan Arkin or Philip Seymour Hoffman, who can play anything because they disappear into their characters.
Summary
Even if you don’t have Apple TV, you’ll probably be able to see Napoleon for free soon. I’d say, “Skip it. Wrong script, wrong director, wrong actor. Good battle scenes, though.”
The prize for historical inaccuracy still goes to Braveheart.