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| Images courtesy of Sony Pictures |
For decades Stanley Kubrick’s most talked about original
film project that would’ve gone into production after 2001: A Space Odyssey was
Napoleon or a biographical account of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Though the film was never made, elite
publishing company Taschen and Kubrick’s estate put together a Napoleon book
chronicling the script and the preproduction work conducted on the unrealized
project. Meanwhile Steven Spielberg, Kubrick’s
widow Christiane and brother Jan Harlan are currently producing an HBO
miniseries version of Kubrick’s Napoleon as a seven-part limited event
series. All the while this years-in-the-making
project on the French emperor and military commander during the French
Revolution was gestating, circa 2020 out of nowhere ahead of the COVID-19
pandemic, here comes Ridley Scott announcing his version of Napoleon
shortly after completing The Last Duel, thereby beating Kubrick’s
still-unrealized take on the French leader to the finish line.
Penned by All the Money in the World screenwriter
David Scarpa and jointly co-produced by Scott Free Productions, Sony and Apple
Original Films (for a planned extended director’s cut release down the line),
Ridley Scott’s version of Napoleon reunites the director with Gladiator
villain and two-time Academy Award winning actor Joaquin Phoenix in the
role of the controversial French leader.
Lensed by legendary Polish cinematographer Darius Wolski who has since
become Ridley’s new go-to director of photography and given a stirring period
epic score by Woman in Gold composer Martin Phipps, the $200 million
historical action drama is meat-and-potatoes David Lean by way of Anthony Mann
with wide, expansive vistas of the English countryside for grandiose battle
sequences. In between the bullet-points
jumping editing (truncated from 4½ to 2½ hours), the film zeroes in when it can
on the difficult relationship between Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de
Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby).
A tightly compacted epic with little to no breathing room
outside of charting all of the primary historical points in the timeline, Napoleon
continues in Scott’s rapid-fire filmmaking aesthetic (reportedly shot in just
62 days) at the ripe old age of 86 which feels further and further removed from
the fruitful visual artist who once gave us The Duellists. Mostly a good (not great) historical epic
with a bit more of an adult leaning than his previous swordsman wartime epics Gladiator
or Kingdom of Heaven, the film mostly rests on the shoulders of Joaquin
Phoenix who makes a great Napoleon Bonaparte and is always a gifted performer
to watch in whatever film he’s in of varying qualities. The film’s expansive supporting cast of
international performers including but not limited to Rupert Everette and Ben
Miles is almost too much to keep up with and merely function as characters in
the saga to play off of Phoenix.
Where the film stumbles is in the editing room, jumping and
jumping at a feverish rate from important historical moment to moment as it
advances onward with Napoleon towards his conquering and eventual defeats
and exiles. Moving with the pace of a
Christopher Nolan film despite being far more linear comparatively, Napoleon
tries to cram in a lot of information into its tightly knit running time
and the lack of breathing room is felt heavily.
In some ways, one wonders whether or not they’ve seen the real film in
theaters as Scott promises the Apple TV release version will exceed the four-hour
mark. It is frustrating seeing Scott
make these concessions to his work time and time again but here we are.
Released theatrically in November worldwide with an undisclosed
Apple TV+ premiere date ahead, Scott’s divisive yet profitable historical epic
took in somewhere around $200 million to mixed critical and audience
reception. With many lobbying the cursed
words ‘historically inaccurate’ at the film as well as taking aim at the
corners-cutting running time, Ridley Scott was quick to fire back blasting
French critics for ‘not liking themselves’ or something to that effect. Whatever the case, the film in question while
a serviceable unpretentious historical drama kind of makes us long for the
still-unmade Kubrick take on the material.
Scott’s film is good but he’s not the man he was in 1979 and his visual
style simply doesn’t measure up to what he did in the past. Far from bad or boring, just kind of a
middling procedural which observes the man but never really gets inside his head. Oh well, perhaps the director’s cut will be
better.
--Andrew Kotwicki
