“Napoleon” in the cinema: this man is too big for the screen

Peter Blunschi

A film about Napoleon Bonaparte that lasts less than four hours? It doesn’t work at all. For the “larger than life” figure of the upstart from Corsica, who conquered half of Europe and crowned himself Emperor of the French (not of France!), only a cinematic overformat is good enough. And even then, rapprochement can at best be achieved.

Napoleon is a figure too big for the screen. This is also evident from the attempt by 85-year-old workaholic director Ridley Scott, which can be seen in cinemas on Thursday. He “does it” at two and a half hours, the usual average length today, and promptly fails. Although he has a great leading man in Joaquin Phoenix.

Here’s an introduction: According to Wikipedia, Napoleon is the most filmed historical personality, with more than 300 appearances in film and television. If you exclude parodies and other nonsense, you come to a sobering conclusion: many directors – and actors – have committed themselves to the super character.

This also applies to a giant like Marlon Brando, who only reluctantly played Napoleon in ‘Désirée’ in 1954. And for a genius like Stanley Kubrick. He had prepared a Napoleon project in the 1960s, starring the Austrian berserker Oskar Werner. But when ‘Waterloo’ flopped in 1970, producers got cold feet.

That doesn’t deter a maniac like Ridley Scott. And you have to give ‘Napoleon’ one thing: visually the film is a stunner. The images of the Egyptian campaign alone are stunning. This also applies to the fights in which Scott is limited to a few. The British director can do fight scenes, as we’ve known since ‘Gladiator’.

But no matter how much Scott tries to “reduce it to the maximum,” the film remains episodic. Much is only hinted at, such as the fact that the Corsican was simultaneously admired and hated by his enemies. Secondary characters such as his sponsor Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim) remain shadowy. Prior knowledge is needed to avoid becoming completely overwhelmed.

The Russian campaign of 1812, which destroyed the myth of Napoleon’s invincibility, is quickly discussed. Scott spends far too much time on the defeat at Waterloo that sealed his final demise in 1815, without making it clear how close Napoleon came to victory over the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett).

And yet ‘Napoleon’ is not a failure. This is due to the second storyline, the love story with Joséphine de Beauharnais, the daughter of a plantation owner from Martinique. Bonaparte had married her as a young general during the turmoil of the French Revolution, because he hoped for social progress.

This developed into a memorable ‘Amour fou’, characterized by sexual passion of a sometimes violent nature. Shortly after their marriage they shamelessly cheated on each other and never got rid of each other, not even after their divorce in 1810, because Joséphine (a stunning Vanessa Kirby in every way) could not have children.

Napoleon married the Austrian Emperor’s daughter, Marie-Louise, who gave him the heir he longed for. But the correspondence with Joséphine never stopped. When he died in exile on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena in 1821, probably of stomach cancer, her name is said to have been his last word (although this, like many things, is controversial).

At least Scott spares us the cheap trick of having Napoleon rush to the dying Joséphine’s deathbed in time after he returns from his first exile on the island of Elba in 1814 (other directors were less squeamish about this). Both in the film and in reality he arrived late. Joaquin Phoenix pulls out all the stops in the scene, between anger and despair.

His portrayal of the “Emperor” is an event because he neither glorifies him as a figure of light nor demonizes him as a monster. Phoenix’s Napoleon is an unstable person. Before the storming of the British-occupied Fort Toulon in 1792, he almost wet his pants with fear. Ultimately, the unknown artillery officer suddenly became famous.

Napoleon Bonaparte remains an extremely ambivalent figure. He was in the right place at the right time and took advantage of his opponents’ mistakes in his brilliant victories. He remained indifferent to the victims of his wars (about three million, it says at the end of the film), but he was a stranger to the sadistic cruelty of many tyrants.

Such a titanic figure may never be able to do justice on film, even with an exceptional actor like Joaquin Phoenix. That’s why Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ is an ambivalent but fascinating experience. At the same time, Scott is already working on a four-hour director’s cut for Apple TV+.

Apparently he understood that a Napoleon film could not be made in four hours. And not just him. Steven Spielberg announced at the Berlinale in February that he wanted to produce the project of his admired Stanley Kubrick as a miniseries for HBO. The directors may be biting their teeth into Napoleon, but they can’t escape him.

‘Napoleon’ will be in cinemas from November 23.