158 min | R | November 22, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Ridley Scott hands Joaquin Phoenix the most consequential man in modern European history and dares him to play the whole thing as a sulky, jealous shut-in. The battles are enormous. The man at the center is a void, and that is the point until it stops being interesting.
Napoleon traces the rise of a Corsican artillery officer from the Siege of Toulon to the chaos of Waterloo. The film is not a biography of a strategist. It is a study of a man who conquers Europe and still cannot hold the attention of his wife. Ridley Scott structures the picture around two engines running in parallel. One is the battlefield, where Napoleon is decisive and cold. The other is the bedroom, where he is petulant and desperate, and the film argues that the second drives the first.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon Bonaparte as a sullen, watchful creature who mumbles his way through coronations and barks across dinner tables. He builds the character on awkwardness rather than grandeur. The performance refuses the heroic register and finds something stranger underneath. Vanessa Kirby plays Josephine Bonaparte with a knowing stillness that gives her the upper hand in every private scene. She understands her power over him and uses it, and Kirby plays the exhaustion of being the object of an obsession she never asked for. Tahar Rahim brings oily calculation to Paul Barras, and Rupert Everett plays the Duke of Wellington with the bored contempt of a man who knows he has already won.
Scott and writer David Scarpa stage the battles as machines of mud and frozen bodies. The set piece at Austerlitz is the strongest sequence in the film. Cannon fire cracks the ice of a frozen lake and cavalry sink into black water, and the camera holds on horses thrashing under the surface long enough to make the spectacle feel like slaughter rather than triumph. The production design treats Napoleon’s interiors as cold and over-furnished spaces that dwarf the people inside them. The trouble is the editing. The film leaps across years and continents in jagged cuts that flatten two decades of upheaval into a sequence of episodes, and the human thread between Napoleon and Josephine keeps snapping under the speed.
The result is a film at war with its own ambitions. Scott has the resources to render history at full scale and the instinct to undercut every great man with pettiness and need. Those two impulses never fully reconcile. The battle scenes demand awe and the domestic scenes demand mockery, and the cuts between them leave the viewer holding neither. Napoleon is the work of a director who can build the spectacle of an empire and cannot decide whether he wants you to believe in it.