Napoleon (2023) Movie Review
There’s a moment in the film where Napoleon utters the line, “I am the first to admit when I make a mistake. I simply never do.” Perfect lines like this are sprinkled throughout Ridley Scott’s two hour and thirty-eight minute historical epic, which makes it all the more frustrating that the movie doesn’t quite live up to its potential.
The opening scene showcases Marie Antoinette’s (Catherine Walker) long walk to the guillotine. It’s actually a fitting and effective start to the movie and plops you directly into the chaos and bloodthirst that consumed France in the late 1700’s. From there we see Napoleon’s (Joaquin Phoenix) meteoric rise to power and prominence largely due to his military prowess and precision. His takeover at Toulon is well executed by Scott and the pace zips along to his budding romance with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). For a while, the focus is on their complex and incredibly interesting relationship. There is an innate power struggle between the two and they battle over everything, sometimes amusingly so. When Josephine calls him fat, Napoleon’s retort is that he enjoys eating and points at his plate saying, “Destiny has brought this pork chop to me.”
Scott teeters on the brink of satire and comical inserts like this often, but not often enough to bring the movie squarely in that genre. The constant back and forth between seriousness and satire makes it difficult to get a handle on the movie. And Phoenix’s listless affect makes it difficult to feel as if we truly know Napoleon at all. The historical inaccuracies won’t bother many (other than grumpy historians) but Scott fails to fully commit either way. He doesn’t pull a full on apolitical farce the way Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) does. But he’s also not committed to painstakingly adhering to timelines and historical accuracies and the movie suffers from his lack of definiteness on either path.
The battle scenes (and there are many) are either incredibly engaging or a total bore. The most masterful is the Battle of Austerlitz, which best showcased Napoleon’s strategy and Scott’s directorial prowess. It is artistic the way cannonballs pilfer the frozen lake. And soldiers’ deaths on the battlefield have never been more gracefully or beautifully shot. But it seems Scott almost ran out of ideas or time because the final battle scene at Waterloo is grand in scale but ultimately lacks any type of intensity or firm direction.
The true bright spot in the film is Vanessa Kirby who easily puts in the best and most nuanced performance. Every glance from Kirby’s Josephine feels coded and her relationship with Napoleon is the most interesting part of the plot. While Phoenix imbues Napoleon with a passive, almost dull personality wherein you wonder what (if anything) is actually going on in his brain, Kirby’s Josephine is full of life, complexity, and intriguing contradictions that we wish would have been fully explored. The most personality we see exhibited from Napoleon is when he is interacting with her. And their love story is unconventional to say the least.
Napoleon is not entirely a waste of time. There are plenty of moments worth watching from select battle scenes to pithy one liners delivered by actors who have oodles of talent. Moments of brilliance from Scott, like the well executed Battle of Austerlitz, should not be swept under the rug. But the movie as a whole doesn’t feel complete and gets bogged down in the last hour until it feels like a slog. To his credit, Scott does not seem to glorify Napoleon, even adding in the number of people killed due to his conquests before the credits roll. But even after nearly three hours of watching the French military commander, he remains as much a mystery as ever.
You’ll like this movie if:
1. Battle scenes are your thing
2. You like historical fiction
3. You like watching biopics that should have been a limited series
