Ridley Scott's Napoleon Complex
The epic biopic is good enough to make you wish it were great
Behind every great man is a great woman, and behind every biopic’s leading man is a great actress playing his wife.
It goes without saying that Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is about the not-actually-that-diminutive emperor played by Joaquin Phoenix, but it’s le petit caporal’s long-suffering wife who reshapes the epic biopic into something worthy of such a world-altering figure. Vanessa Kirby, late of The Crown and two years removed from her well-deserved Oscar nomination for Pieces of a Woman, co-stars as Empress Joséphine, who keeps Napoleon on his toes and drives his crippling inferiority complex. As this film — which, like Scott’s underrated All the Money in the World, was written by David Scarpa — would have us believe, Napoleon didn’t conquer for France or even for himself. He did it to impress his wife.
Whether or not that’s true is impossible to say a couple centuries later, especially since Scott has never been much for historical accuracy, but it makes for a compelling dynamic nevertheless. At times Napoleon is almost reminiscent of Phantom Thread in its portrayal of an obsessive man’s increasingly toxic marriage, both halves of which seem to enjoy the dysfunction more than they probably should; Scott and Scarpa don’t explore that aspect of the two leads’ relationship as much as they might have, alas, a missed opportunity to add further nuance to a familiar formula.
Like a lot of biopics, Napoleon instead plays as a greatest-hits version of its subject’s life that, both by design and necessity, glosses over key aspects lest the runtime balloon to a length that makes executives worry and audiences fidget. (It’s a fairly breezy 157 minutes, in case you were wondering.) Anyone hoping for more than 10 minutes devoted to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia will be sorely disappointed, as will those who expected a portrait of the conqueror as a young man — Napoleon is already well into his military career by the time we meet him.
The film begins the day that Marie Antoinette became intimately acquainted with the guillotine and ends with Napoleon’s exile on St. Helena several decades later. Bookending the narrative with two disgraceful exits was clearly a deliberate statement on what awaits so many who reach legendary status within their own lifetimes. Few attain glory; fewer still hold on to it. But while it’s true that Napoleon’s military career ended in ignominy at Waterloo, there probably won’t be any biopics about the general who defeated him anytime soon.
Which isn’t to say that Napoleon lionizes the eponymous emperor. Scott and Phoenix previously collaborated on Gladiator, another movie in which the actor played a supreme ruler as petulant as he was all-powerful; here again the emperor is devastatingly insecure, a problem both assuaged and exacerbated by the empress. She cheats on him, tells him he’s nothing without her, and uses the oddly motivating power of these actions to manifest the greatness he believes he’s destined to achieve.
The problem, then, is that Napoleon somehow gives short shrift to both halves of its equation — you somehow leave wanting more of the chamber drama and more battlefield sequences. But it’s ultimately saved, as are so many capital-g Great men, by the woman who spends so much time just out of frame. Just as Joséphine was the animating force in Napoleon’s life, so too is she the impetus behind much of what we see in Napoleon. It’s just a shame we don’t see more of her. That’s likely to be remedied by the director’s cut, which clocked in at just over four hours as of a month ago and is supposedly going to stream on Apple TV+ at some point in the near future, but for now Napoleon feels like a movie that has yet to achieve the greatness it was destined for.
A "breezy" 157 minutes!