Napoleon - Director's Cut

Appropriately enough, given that the feature itself is obsessed with describing folly and decay, Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Napoleon finds itself dumped, with very little of the expected ceremony, to Apple's streaming service in the midst of a PR downturn for its star, Joaquin Phoenix. As well as torpedoing a Todd Haynes project by walking away at the last possible moment and leaving the rest of the cast and crew in the lurch, Phoenix's Joker follow-up, presumably the guaranteed hit he was expecting to re-write his 2024, attracted far more puzzled shrugs than expected at the Venice Film Festival. As if preternaturally conscious of this widespread cooling on its lead actor, and with nearly an hour more than the theatrical edit to play around with, Scott's second (released) pass at his bored, hateful Napoleon is, at least in its earliest passages, now happy to take the title character off the table for longer periods, apportioning more space to such things as the plight of women during the French Revolution. 

Obviously then that means particular attention is now paid to Vanessa Kirby's Joséphine. Although clearly a crucial aspect of the scaffolding underlining Napoleon's ascent from a canny officer to a crowned Emperor in the previous version of the film, Kirby's former viscountess is almost elevated to a co-lead here. Unlike the armies of soldiers, advisers, and hangers-on that sweep in and out of the piece, her Joséphine lingers, enjoying several successive scenes of her own, all of which are constructed around this woman's perspective and the dilemmas she encounters. Following the arrest and subsequent beheading of her aristocrat husband, Joséphine is herself imprisoned. During this detainment she is instructed, by another jailed lady, to get herself pregnant as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the child she carries will then delay her own execution. Of course the previous assembly held similar material but the telling there was perfunctory, as if in a rush to place Kirby by Phoenix's side. Here we're allowed a few scenes of Joséphine picking apart her place in post-revolutionary France.

We see the sacrifices Joséphine will have to make; the men she will have to sleep with and the alliances she will need to cultivate if she is to keep herself and, more importantly, her children safe from the guillotine. Her marriage to Napoleon offers the status and stability she craves but, in this broader telling at least, the relationship does (eventually) strike a note of equitability. Although Joséphine is dismissed just as quickly as Napoleon's other advisors, her voice is pointedly heard following her husband's less careful decrees. Her notes an informed or steadying influence that isn't heeded. Later, frostbitten and excreting blood in the midst of a Russian winter, it is clearer now that this Napoleon really is nothing without his Joséphine. Her absence, as the film winds its way towards another exile, is much more keenly felt too. The despondency lingers: Napoleon climbing into his former wife's death bed just to feel close to her. Prior to this viewing, the worry presented by a longer telling of Napoleon was that Scott's film would lose the harried but intoxicating energy that previously blasted us through a lifetime that has been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. Although that style of construction has been mitigated (but not completely eliminated) here, the mode of storytelling that replaces it is one that consistently reiterates then underlines its points. 

For the armchair generals, who chafed when viewing last November's highlights package, Napoleon's battles are, presently, both more frequent and more complex in how they are expressed. Their telling is a little less tidy and therefore better able to generate a feeling that, in the thousands of men gobbled up by cannon fire, we are seeing the pitiless result of machinery coming to bear on vulnerable, goose-pimpled flesh. This awfulness then not simply a spectacle of detonation but the design and application of competing mad men. If the appearance of Chris Morris collaborator Kevin Eldon, or The Death of Stalin's Simon Russell Beale for that matter, weren't enough of a hint then frequent, straining trips to the lavatory in this Director's Cut confirm that Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's Napoleon was always intended to be both sardonic and relentlessly improper. No matter how high this Emperor climbs there will always be some rude intrusion from reality to bring him crashing back down to earth. While she yet lives, Joséphine is often this instant adjustment - laughing in the face of a husband who reflexively issues the kind of pounding, master of the universe rhetoric so beloved of history books. When she's no longer available to us, Scott ensures that gnats itch and bother conspiring royals or flocks of birds slather stale Russian throne rooms with their chalky white shit. 

Martin Phipps - Joséphine

Napoleon

Ridley Scott's latest is an expensive historical biopic bankrolled by two electronics giants, the duo perhaps angling for some award season glory for their respective motion picture subsidiaries. Napoleon though is absent a great deal of the fawning hosannas that are usually deployed to justify the existence of similar films. The piece consistently works against the potential for its subject to be viewed in terms of sainted legend. Given the mammoth spend associated with simulating the massing armies of the distant past, often there's a sense, conceptually, that biographical epics should impart some sort of lesson. To simultaneously bring history to life while reassuring cagey, modern viewers that their time (and money) is being invested responsibly. Clocking in just under two hours and forty minutes, Scott's Napoleon betrays no such pretension. The film abandons the structural propriety, not to mention grave intonation, of this particular genre to arrive at a method of communication that gallops about, restlessly, in both time and space. Scenes begin with very little warning or preamble: the subjects of these arrangements often even seem momentarily startled that they have instantly arrived in these temporal situations.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon throughout the film, no matter how young or old he is supposed to be. He is our constant, maintaining his usual, indignant murmur regardless of the occasion. Instead of chocolate box laurels, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have approached the life and military achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte in terms of a sporting or artistic career: specifically, the ups and downs experienced by, or exerted on, an expert strategist. Campaigns and conquests are presented as individual projects that are often portrayed in terms of one striking image to denote a high (like, for instance, a cannon ball striking The Great pyramid of Giza), rather than a more serious, scholarly interrogation. The human neuroses that powered this series of violent expansions are afforded no small attention too, with the infatuation Napoleon feels for Vanessa Kirby's rather less enthusiastic Joséphine being particularly crucial. This preoccupation is important first in terms of revealing a grunting, human side to this monarch; later though Scott and Scarpa use the relationship to lightly pick at the idea that first-loves - the ones who supported their partners when they were climbing - are held with a regard that transcends any other pairing that follows. So, after his son is born to an Austrian Archduchess, this Napoleon journeys across countries to present a swaddled baby to his ex: a strange, Martian attempt at palliation. 

The hold that Napoleon's work-life has on the film is such that we are never subjected to inquiring glimpses into his childhood; no inciting events that shaped this personification of human ambition. Likewise there is precious little attention paid to Bonaparte's various periods of disgraced exile or the years surrounding his death. We view this Corsican brute as he powers himself up the social pecking order, usually through daring displays of explosive violence. Frequently, Napoleon himself is somewhere inside these swirling maelstroms: sometimes leveraging panic attack-level anxiety to blast himself up a siege ladder; other times riding into the midst of bloody scrums, his sabre drawn then striking. For every moment in Napoleon that teeters (knowingly) on the edge of farce, there's never any attempt made to invalidate the man's skill for arranging artillery or a bravery that sees him, at every level of power, willing to run into battle alongside his soldiers. Scott's Napoleon, for all its horseplay and physical humour, does retain this one note of pure adulation for its subject. As is often the case with Ridley Scott films, we are promised a significantly longer director's cut once Napoleon migrates to Apple's streaming platform. Unlike a Kingdom of Heaven though, the aggressive shorthand evident in this theatrical cut works. This assembly's clipped stanza emblematic of an ageing director who, quite simply, no longer has the time to fuck around with any material that doesn't interest him. 

Martin Phipps - Soldiers of the 5th Regiment // Russia