Napoleon: The Director's Cut
The famed conqueror defeats yet another director who dares to put his story on screen, in Ridley Scott's visually sumptuous but dramatically inert biopic.
Before we dive into the substance of the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” a word or two about the history of the famous autocrat’s story on film, and Ridley Scott himself.
Napoleon has been portrayed on film over and over again for the entire history of the medium, but has proven elusive in more ways than one. Some projects were never realized, most famously the adaptation that Stanley Kubrick wrote but never filmed, which Elle Carroll of Vulture calls “arguably the ‘Citizen Kane’ of unrealized projects.”
Recently, Steven Spielberg was said to be preparing Kubrick’s script as a seven-part series for HBO – recall that Spielberg also filmed Kubrick’s unfinished project “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” – but this may or may not still be happening. As so often happens in Hollywood, when parallel projects are in production on the same subject, one usually gets the can. (Remember when Baz Luhrmann was going to give us a rival to Oliver Stone’s biopic about that other famous conqueror, Alexander the Great? I still wish we could have seen that.) We may never see Kubrick’s “Napoleon” in anything but screenplay form.
But even among those films that have made it to the screen, few have fully captured the larger-than-life figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, or the hearts and minds of critics and audiences. Perhaps the only one that has won lasting acclaim is the stunningly ambitious five-hour silent epic by Abel Gance. Also simply called “Napoleon,” it was made nearly a century ago and is still evidently the high water mark for Napoleon on film. Though he’s been played by everyone from Marlon Brando to Rod Steiger to Ian Holm (three times on film and TV!), no one has yet been able to translate Napoleon’s story into the kind of epoch-defining epic that so many filmmakers have sought. For an admirably thorough run-down of all the dictator’s film appearances, see Ms. Carroll’s terrific Vulture article from November 2023, “Vive L’Empereur! The Long History of Napoleon Onscreen.” (Yes, it even includes “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)
Enter Ridley Scott. If anybody could pull off a tale of such grandeur, Sir Ridley seems to have had as good a shot at any. Scott is a veteran director of historical epics, and he’s no stranger to this period of history, as anybody who’s seen his gorgeous 1977 debut “The Duellists” can attest. But “Napoleon” came and went in theatres during the 2023 holiday season, and stirred little box office success or critical acclaim. Scott may be partly to blame for stealing his own thunder here, by promising that the feature version would be only an appetizer for his fuller director’s cut, to be released later on Apple TV+.
More than perhaps any other contemporary director, Scott has proven that his judgment about which versions of his films are the best product is usually correct. The famed director’s cut of “Blade Runner” delivers a stranger, deeper, and more self-assured vision of a bleak future noir than its butchered theatrical cut. More recently, the director’s cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” presents a richer and more nuanced treatment of the Crusades than the pared-down action-adventure that its theatrical version became.
So, knowing Scott’s track record, I decided to eschew the theatrical cut of “Napoleon” until I could see the complete film.* That moment became increasingly uncertain following the box-office flop of the theatrical cut, until this past week, when “Napoleon: The Director’s Cut” was dropped without warning and with relatively little fanfare on Apple’s streaming platform.
So, was “Napoleon: The Director’s Cut” worth the wait? I’ll get to the point quickly, which is more than I can say for the film itself: Not really.
The purpose of any biopic, especially about a pivotal historical figure like Napoleon, is to give the audience a compelling idea of what drives the individual’s identity and why it matters; an answer to the question urgently shouted across the Suez canal to T.E. Lawrence in “Lawrence of Arabia” (in this reviewer’s opinion, still the greatest biopic of all time) – “Who are you?”
“Napoleon” refuses to answer this question. The film fails to put forth a coherent or even complete thesis to provide a throughline for one of history’s most (in)famous conquerors. In a life so crammed with consequential events, over a relatively short period of about 30 years, some things simply have to be left out of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie. To make a life such as his intelligible, we have to place some specific focus on it, either by limiting the time frame or scope of the events covered. Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa frustratingly do neither, though they do make a definite choice about how to frame Napoleon’s life: through his relationship with his wife Josephine.
Unfortunately, this severely limits “Napoleon’s” ability to explain much about the man, or even to shed light on how his personal relationship reflects what he did militarily or politically, and why. Despite the amount of time we spend with them, the audience does not get a satisfying explanation of what makes the imperial couple’s relationship meaningful, even to them, let alone to world events.
The early parts of the story, before Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix, re-teaming with Ridley Scott for the first time since “Gladiator”) and Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) meet each other, provide some insight into what forms each individual. Napoleon Bonaparte, an ambitious Corsican officer, seizes an opportunity to capture military glory by repelling a British incursion into France during its post-Revolution chaos. This early scene showcases the young Napoleon’s tactical brilliance and also hints at bizarre personal motivations: after his horse is brutally killed by cannon fire, he urges his brother to send the cannonball home to their mother.
Meanwhile, Josephine de Beauharnais is established early as a determined survivor, imprisoned and threatened with death during the “Reign of Terror,” merely for being married to an aristocrat. Upon hearing that pregnant women are granted a temporary reprieve from execution, she decides to get pregnant by anybody who will have her in the Carmes prison, so she can live to return home to her own children.
Once Napoleon meets Josephine, though, the insight we get into either character becomes oddly obscure thereafter. What attracts the General to this particular woman in the first place? What lies behind her decision to ally herself with him? Sexual passion is clearly a motivation, though neither is their partner’s first or only lover, and furthermore, Napoleon himself shows little imagination in this capacity. He awkwardly confronts an officer in his army later in the film to interrogate him about how to pleasure his wife, and even then only as an attempt to conquer their infertility — it seems not to have occurred to him to do this for her on his own. And yet, this central relationship upstages the events of Napoleon’s campaigns and conquests, to the extent that — as one example — he cuts short his expedition in Egypt to rush home to Josephine, upon hearing that she has taken a lover in his absence.
Thus begins one of the story’s many conflicts between Napoleon and Josephine, in which it becomes clear, at least through Vanessa Kirby’s portrayal, that she knows exactly what kind of power she holds over the commander. She forces him to eat his own words and confess that he believes he is nothing without her. But why? What keeps Napoleon coming back to Josephine, and why is she always so quick to forgive him after their many fights? Joaquin Phoenix gives us few clues in his inscrutably flat performance, though he appears noticeably more animated and vulnerable in his scenes with Kirby than in the rest of the film. And “Napoleon” fails to sustain any dramatic tension through these repeated confrontations, as they always seem to end with the Emperor crawling back to Josephine, no matter how violently he has exploded, and the Empress dropping her hostility and going with the flow.
Even when their marriage takes a back seat to Napoleon’s dynastic ambition, and he divorces her to secure a marriage that will give him an heir, Josephine is curiously passive. She accepts, without much comment, an arrangement that allows Napoleon to have his cake and eat it, too. Josephine becomes more or less a kept woman in a luxurious estate of her own, where the Emperor visits her frequently, even presenting his son by his new wife to her. But either Kirby herself, or Josephine, or both, plays her cards so close to the chest that it is infuriatingly impossible to understand fully how this situation affects her.
By placing this relationship at the center of the film, and then failing to invest it with much emotional insight, Scott sets up the rest of his would-be epic for failure as well. We get more passionate protestations of love and longing via letters read in voice-over than in Napoleon and Josephine’s scenes together, and these letters are played against the commander’s globe-trotting exploits, rendering those epochal events somewhat trivial by the juxtaposition.
Indeed, the famous military and political conquests of Napoleon are treated in an annoyingly haphazard and cursory fashion, as the film hops fast and frequently between important events in different times and places. Despite this film’s marathon-like run time, these still feel like excerpts from some even longer film that might appropriately put them all in context. Even for someone familiar with the broad strokes of the history behind these events, it’s difficult to understand why events unfold where, when, and how they do in the film, or who among the vast supporting cast is supposed to be important at any given time. We get the sense that Scott is just dutifully ticking boxes of the key events of Napoleon’s life, while trying to get back to the central story of Napoleon and Josephine. But when that, too, proves unsatisfying, “Napoleon” ends up being less than the sum of its parts, like a History Channel documentary playing in the background while the viewer is doing something else.
It’s a shame that this is the case, too, because Ridley Scott literally frames all of this with his trademark visual mastery. His painterly talent for screen composition is on full display, and together with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Scott delivers a feast for the eye in every shot. Light and darkness play against one another in sumptuous beauty to create an environment seemingly governed by no more natural light or candlelight than would be found indoors at that time. In this sense it is reminiscent of Kubrick’s revolutionary candlelight photography in “Barry Lyndon,” the closest he ever came to making his own “Napoleon.”
And Scott can still film a huge honking battle scene like no other, as best seen in the harrowing battle of Austerlitz, fought on a frozen lake – this scene calls to mind another epic work of the past, the famous battle on the ice from Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky.” (This is what happens when I get bored with a film on its own merits; I start finding parallels to other more interesting films.) Through Scott and Wolski’s lens, the snowy, misty chaos of this battle becomes an evocative canvas in France’s colors of blue, white, and blood-red, as the forces of Austria and Russia plunge to watery graves through the broken ice.
All this sound and fury signifies nothing, though, no matter how beautiful it is to behold. Lacking a coherent emotional core, what does it mean to us when Napoleon takes up the responsibility of enforcing post-Revolutionary France’s Republican virtues, or when he later betrays those same virtues by assuming an Imperial crown? What is gained or lost, for France or Napoleon, through all these battles? Who does he think he is, anyway? Apart from “a man who misses his wife,” we really can’t say.
By the time Napoleon meets his inevitable end at Waterloo, in another gloriously staged set piece, my attitude as a viewer matches the barely contained, even somewhat bored contempt of Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington — his demeanor says not, “this is surely the end of an era and a pivotal moment in European history,” but, “geez, it’s this a-hole again.” By this point, Napoleon has already lost Josephine, and thus, the film has lost its raison d’etre, so it’s hard to care. Maybe Everett is on to something here with Wellington’s sniffy disdain for the whole affair.
So, the great conqueror has defeated yet another filmmaker who has attempted to capture him on screen. Will we ever see a successful, compelling film that might match or even exceed Abel Gance’s triumph of nearly a hundred years ago? Only time will tell. Meanwhile — and if you’ve read this far, I thank you for sticking with this saga of disappointment — you won’t miss much if you skip this one.
*Note: I also intentionally avoided any reviews of the theatrical version of “Napoleon,” including the one here on the Yap, but if you’d like to see what Alec Toombs made of it, you can read it here.