The Media Tourist

Joaquin Phoenix steps into history as France’s most famous despot

Napoleon
Starring Joaquin Phoenix & Vanessa Kirby
Directed by Ridley Scott
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 22

One of history’s most famous love stories was written in blood. In this expansively, elaborately expensive epic historical biopic, Joaquin Phoenix stars as the French emperor whose military conquests were a brutal backdrop for the domestic battles he waged with his wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Director Ridley Scott creates a sumptuous, spectacular saga about Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier in the French army who rose quickly within its ranks in the late 1700s to become one of the most wide-ranging military commanders in all of Europe. History remains somewhat divided on Napoleon, with assessments falling along a spectrum of opinion ranging from despotic megalomaniacal dwarf to brilliant military strategist. But this movie mostly splits the difference in favor of a sprawling period-piece portrait of a complicated, obsessive leader and his muddy, bloody times.

The movie establishes its battleground bona fides in the opening 15 minutes, during the close of the tumultuous French Revolution. Marie Antoinette meets her end at the guillotine, a horse gets its head blown off by a cannonball, and Bonaparte reaches into the hole to pull out the steed’s heart—as a souvenir for his mother. War is hell, and Napoleon, his face spattered with fresh blood, develops an early taste for it.

The battle scenes are dynamic, visceral, impressively boom-boomy and gruesomely gorgeous; in one, Napoleon’s army corners retreating Russians on a frozen lake, then fires cannonballs into the ice from a wooded hillside. Bloodied bodies flail helplessly as they sink slowly into the freezing, deathly depths in a winter ballet of red-smeared carnage.

But for Napoleon, all’s fair in love and war. When he isn’t opening his bag of tactical dirty tricks to fight the Austrians, the Russians or the British, he comes home to spar with Josephine. He throws food at her at the dinner table, bonks her in the bedroom like a rabid bunny, scolds her for her infidelity while he’s away doing war stuff (conquering Egypt), and ultimately leaves her for another woman when she’s unable to bear him an heir. But she, somehow, loves him after all that, remaining a central part of the story, an essential part of his story. And he remains obsessed with her. Napoleon is crushed to find out that all the gushy letters he’s been dutifully writing to Josephine have been stolen and sold. And this was centuries before Ebay!

Phoenix, who also appeared in director Scott’s Gladiator, is center stage here as one of history’s most consequential and controversial characters, bratty, petulant, temperamental and dictatorial, maybe even batshit crazy; he’s The Joker in a pointy, bicorne hat. “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” he fumes at a British ambassador about England’s naval superiority. Kirby, a distinguished British actress, is elegantly stoic as Josephine, who sticks by her man even when his outbursts reduce her to tears.  

The movie notes that Napoleon staged some 60 battles, only losing seven of them—one of which was at Waterloo, a defeat so infamously disastrous it became shorthand for almost any decisive, game-over setback. The historical Napoleon himself became a sort of pop-cultural, comical shorthand—an avatar for domineering behavior, overcompensation for a less-than-imposing stature. (Even though we don’t know how tall Napoleon actually was in real life, the movie suggests he could use a few inches, notably when he requires a boost to peer into an Egyptian sarcophagus and view a mummy’s ancient face.) He’s been the subject of countless movies, including one as early as 1913, and widely parodied, in Bugs Bunny cartoons and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Minions and Night at the Museum.

But this Napoleon is no cartoon, no joke and certainly no dry, dull history lesson. It brings to the big screen a bold new take on the enduring tale one of history’s most endlessly fascinating figures, the forever controversial Frenchman who dominated so much of the known world—and the woman who conquered his heart back home.

—Neil Pond