Napoleon is an oddly charming portrait of the complex emotions behind this historical figure.
First off, if you’re looking for a historical epic filled with enormous battle scenes, this isn’t the movie for you. While it is shot on an incredibly grand scale and features impressively directed action when it chooses to, it doesn’t spend most of its runtime here.
Most of Napoleon’s runtime is spent unpacking the fraught relationship Napoleon had with his wife Joséphine. Scott chooses uses this as a framing device for a sort of revisionist history that paints Bonaparte as an insecure, often emotionally unstable man—starkly different from the epic hero that history paints to be. This is done quite effectively if not for the fact that it gives the audience no chance to contrast this with the historically resonant depiction of Napoleon.
This is because the story gives very little sense of scale to Napoleon’s achievements, nor his psyche or egoism. To be clear, I don’t lament the fact that Scott opted not to spend the majority of the runtime on the battles, I actually think that was a smart choice which gave the story a more introspective focus (a strategy that I already worked well for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette).
However I do think Scott needed to give some sense of the scale of Napoleon’s achievements if only to provide the context necessary to then juxtapose that with his rather insecure personality. If you’re going to tell a revisionist history that tries to subvert the narrative, you need to give some sense of what the reality was assumed to be. To understand why it’s so funny that Napoleon is a sad little man, we also need to know that he somehow conquered multiple countries and did so quickly and brutally. A simple montage or similar creative choice that takes up little runtime would have worked just fine (like the one’s used by Danny Boyle in his Steve Jobs biopic).
I am however delighted to report that the movie is surprisingly funny. Phoenix does a hilarious job playing this insecure man who uses humour as a defence mechanism. Phoenix’s take on Bonaparte is drenched in deep sarcasm wrapped in hubris that delivers lines simultaneously baffling and incredibly funny. There is a moment where Napoleon is picked on for his indulgence in food and his reply is some of my favourite lines of dialogue in a historical biopic ever written.
Visually, Napoleon is grandly shot and has absolutely perfect set design. I found the colours to be wonderfully representative of the era and surrounding context, giving a wonderfully warm glow to the French royalty and architecture, and bleak grey look to the battle scenes and more intimate moments. For all of this, it still feels odd that Apple sold the film as a historical epic, focusing almost exclusively on the action scenes in the trailers, which is at least a little bit misleading.
In all, the film is oddly charming mostly because of it’s clever dialogue, layered performance, even if it lacks in scope and scale.