There is a hunger within all people of ambition to become remembered as extraordinary among ordinary circumstances. This hunger is still very real for the modern person. We no longer have foreign lands to conquer and battlefields upon which to die. We have substituted our great conquests with becoming cataloged, hypnotized, deodorized cyborgs strapped to our seats and our screens and forced to scrounge for victory. Competition is artificial and made only to quell us temporarily. It is no wonder, then, that so many fall into the idolization of the great men that came before us, those great commanders like Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Saladin, Genghis Khan — all of whom made their own history and saw the unconquerable as their challenge.
They are the natural course of man, both in their methods of love and brutality. Of course, it goes without saying that it is wrong to romanticize war. Most of the world’s misery has been caused by war. And once the wars are over, no one ever remembers why they were fought. However, there should be a distinction between representing the ultimate human struggle that is warfare and glorifying it, such that we can see in the art which we make depicting these mighty men.
One such piece is director Ridley Scott’s latest work, “Napoleon,” about the little corporal from Corsica and his rise to becoming the second-most written about man in human history, behind only Jesus Christ. Scott’s interpretation of the life of Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) centers around his tumultuous marriage with Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), his egotistical and ambitious rise to power, and his ultimate downfall as his personal grievances with the other nations of Europe turned into campaigns, taking the totaled lives of three million people across Afro-Eurasia. These complex topics are juggled throughout its 158-minute duration, though oftentimes rapidly, due to the large amount of history that must be covered.
This issue is inevitable with the amount of history needed to be covered within the relatively short runtime. For the sake of comparison, Abel Gance’s “Napoléon” (1927) is five and a half hours long and was supposed to be the first of a hexalogy. Both Hollywood and the Soviets made their versions of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in 1956 and 1967 respectively, the latter of which is over seven hours long. Fitting this great story into a commercially reasonable runtime is most difficult, nearly impossible, but Scott and his editors manage to do well enough with their attempt.
The grand spectacles of the battles are something to behold, especially in IMAX. The culmination of thousand-horse cavalry charges, the countless cannons, mortars, muskets, and thirty thousand men in uniform turned into a mangled and twisted dark mountain of flesh and wood and steel. “The only thing worse than a battle lost is a battle won,” wrote the Duke of Wellington upon the ending of his 1815 battle against Napoleon in Waterloo, and the film makes sure such a maxim is absolute.
Just as interesting as the Napoleonic Wars is the man behind them all. That is all he is, Napoleon Bonaparte, just a man, as much as he wishes that he were God. A little man with a big ambition who quickly gets tied up with a woman who he sees something wrong with from the beginning. Napoleon is swept by lust as quickly as Josephine is introduced, and just as quickly as they finalize their marriage, Napoleon makes a facial expression that indicates he has made a terrible mistake. Upon his absence due to his campaigns, we hear through narration of his letters his immaturity and toxicity towards his wife, juxtaposed over Josephine making love to other men. When confronting her, he chooses to belittle her, beat her, and call her names, just as she does to him.
This all comes to a head when met with Josephine’s infertility, which Napoleon sees as the final straw to the marriage, as he deems her useless to France. It is quite a sad sight to see, though the film tries to show us how such a situation came to be. Despite all of the terrible actions committed by the characters, it is only Napoleon who stands at the end of the film, as he does throughout, claiming that he never made a mistake, neither on the battlefield nor in his personal life.
The film does skew this narrative, as apart from a few main opposing commanders, the general audience is forced to assume that all battle tactics by the French army were orchestrated by Napoleon. For those who have read the many war analyses of the battles of the Napoleonic Wars, this is historically untrue. In the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon likely lost due to Commander Michel Nay’s blunderous cavalry charge against British infantry without any French infantry or artillery support. The film never once mentions Nay, though it shows the failed charge and its consequence. Waterloo is not the only inaccurate portrayal of a battle. The Battle at Toulon (1793), depicted as Napoleon’s first major victory, is shown to be a sweep by the French against the British navy, when in real life, it was nothing of the sort.
All taken into consideration, there were a number of historical inaccuracies which tainted the picture. 24-year old Napoleon did not witness the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette in 1793. The French Army never fired a cannon directly at the Pyramids of Giza, as the Battle of Embabeh (1798) took place nine miles away from the Pyramids. He also did not abandon his campaign in Egypt solely due to his finding out that Josephine was having an affair, but because of France’s economic turmoil, government corruption, failure in the legal system at the time, etc. The list goes on and on throughout the entirety of the film, and it made me personally cringe with how blatantly it lies. The consequence of these little mistakes is that as a character analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte, the film fails to represent how he falls into his downward spiral due to the events occurring around him.
If one goes to see this movie as a one-to-one textbook crash course on Napoleon, they will likely walk away from the picture with the impression that Napoleon was a egotistically warped, kill-hungry monster who after conning his way to the throne was rightfully exiled. The last scene depicts him taking credit for the burning of Moscow, against their insistence that it was the Russians who burned it. He sits there, as a powerless old man, with his last thoughts being of his late ex-wife Josephine, who brought him nothing but insecurity, which he once again pleads he is absent of.
It is quite a disappointment that Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” fails to capture the heroic nature of one of the most looked-up-to figures in history. Not once are his achievements of spreading enlightenment values and the Napoleonic Code or his methodical prowess on battle tactics expressed. Too much skipping of the important context of the events depicted happens throughout. As crazy as it sounds, if the film went on for another hour, perhaps it would be able to realistically pace itself to the events it wishes to depict. It is an okay film, all things considered. Just don’t go hoping you’re going to receive a correctly told story on “Le Petit Caporal.”
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