Joaquin Phoenix captivates in Ridley Scott’s portrait of the Emperor – but the film is not a painstakingly accurate history lesson.
Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby are the double act from heaven trapped in a marriage from hell in this eye-gouging spectacular epic from Ridley Scott. It’s a shamelessly ambitious 32-year gallop through the second and third acts of the life of Napoleon (Phoenix), beginning with a startling shot of the future emperor, standing and scowling at the foot of the guillotine in 1793, just as Marie Antoinette is beheaded.
Pedants, beware: Napoleon is not a painstakingly accurate history lesson but an impressionistic portrait, built upon conspicuous visual references to sources as varied as Abel Gance’s 1927 biopic Napoleon, the 19th-century painting Bonaparte Before the Sphinx and even his own Gladiator – which also starred Phoenix as a troubled emperor with a poisonous personal life.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as Napoleon Bonaparte.
This protagonist, thankfully, is less odious than his Roman screen cousin, but the captivating power of Phoenix’s performance, delivered in his American vernacular, is that it hovers in a twitchy, shifty, grey zone between imperious outbursts, wounded vulnerability, and puckish charm.
He sometimes combines all three, as when the emperor throws a foot-stamping tantrum at the perceived superiority of his British foes.
“They think they’re so great!” he says, hands in fists, toddler-style. “Because they’ve got boats!”
He is smartly balanced by Kirby as Josephine, who emerges from prison soon after the Terror with punishment pixie cut and survivor’s rage and sees in this “low-bred Corsican thug” a fellow outsider and an easy path back towards the upper echelons of Parisian society.
The relationship between the pair forms the emotional backbone of a film that also includes six sternum-rattling battles that begin with the Siege of Toulon and end with Waterloo. They are so maximalist (Horses! Explosions! Cannonballs! Cannonballs exploding horses!) that their impact can feel overwhelming, if not deadening
The vaguely sadomasochistic parameters of the pair’s bond are outlined early in a courtship scene with a cheeky nod to Basic Instinct, and soon after in an argument that culminates in a brutal conjugal encounter and Josephine’s demand that Napoleon declare his subservience with a cry of “I am nothing without you!”
The public pressure to produce an heir, accompanied by the ever-present threat of divorce, only compounds the destructive dynamics of this especially twisted love story.
The battles elsewhere continue apace as our diminutive hero marches towards his appointment with destiny in 1815 in a field in Belgium. And here Rupert Everett pops up as a fabulously salty Duke of Wellington, giving the film a deliciously acerbic jolt just when it needed it most.
