Napoleon

Abba sung about Waterloo in under 3 minutes whereas for Ridley Scott his tale of that particular battle, and the life of Napoleon, is closer to 3 hours with an even longer, supposedly 4 hour version coming to AppleTV+.

Enough with the facetiousness, Scott’s film of this titanic (but ironically pint-sized) figure unfortunately isn’t quite the definite article.

Cramming the life of the Emperor, his myriad battles and the ongoing political circumstances both in France and Europe at the time into one film was always going to incur a long and unwieldy runtime.

Scott does pretty well to keep proceedings clear and moving forward briskly but, because of this approach, a few spots of the history get muddled and you’re left with an interesting and broad overview, albeit one lacking true depth.

Scott’s focus is more on the man himself and it works as a character study. On equal footing with the fighting is Napoleon’s relationship with his wife Josephine and it is in these scenes that we get our true glimpse into the man and the true brilliance of Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal (excellent as always and bound to be awards-nominated.)

Phoenix tows the line perfectly between showing the stern stoicism of the commander and the vulnerable insecurities of the man. It’s an unbiased and honest portrayal and it’s interesting to speculate and delve beyond just a timeline of events.

However, despite attempts to lighten the mood at points with a spot of humour or an original take on the period drama concept, it suffers a little from fustiness and those bright spots only serve to show what this film potentially could have been under different circumstances. It feels like it can’t quite decide what to be and this scattershot nature lets it down.

Those more speculative intimate scenes of Napoleon and Josephine therefore stand as the film’s heart, beyond the wider historical context and scenes of war. It’s also, sadly, very difficult to follow what’s going on in those battle sequences. Great credit must go to all involved for staging such grand scenes but, unfortunately, all bar one suffer from some sort of debilitating factor: too dark, too fast in the edit, too confusing.

The Battle of Austerlitz is the one true triumph here and is a sequence to place up there with cinematic large scale battle scenes. It’s another example where the film shows what it could have been, only fuelling the frustration further.

Sadly, Napoleon is just a teensy bit stale and a teensy bit boring. Too unforgivable adjectives in a film of this scale and with a figure of this much interest and importance at its centre (and also from the Director of Gladiator.)

Hopefully the longer cut will prove to be the one but a little Swedish pop Midas touch originality is needed here.

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