'Napoleon' and the Dark Comedy of Running the World

Not many people saw The Last Duel in theaters, which is a shame. It’s one of Ridley Scott’s best movies, a film that speaks not only to the #MeToo movement, but also how men construct narratives that make them the heroes in their own minds even though women, by virtue of necessity, see the world far more clearly. Scott’s latest film, Napoleon, feels like a continuation of that idea. While the trailer plays up the epic battles, the movie itself is far more interested in trying to pull apart Napoleon’s (Joaquin Phoenix) rise and fall beyond the battlefield. Where it comes to is a man who is frustrated that those in power only see him as a weapon, and yet he lacks the self-awareness and acumen to be anything more than someone who’s adept at creating quite a lot of death.

Napoleon rests atop three pillars. The first are the battle scenes, which are as thrilling and masterfully captured as anything Scott has done in his career. The film stresses that no matter what we may think of Napoleon off the battlefield, there was a reason he won a lot. However, he was also so egotistical (and perhaps so satisfied by his previous wins) that he kept going when he could have easily controlled his corner of the world. The film tends to keep the battles at face-value: Napoleon deserved to win the ones during his rise, and he deserved to lose the ones during his fall.

This leads to the second pillar, which is the political aspect of the movie, and where the film shines brightest. Because we largely rely on written documentation to get into the minds of these people, we’re left with a record of how these people wished to be seen. We get officious records like the marriage and divorce certificates between Napoleon and the Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), but Scott tries to imagine what happened between the battles and the documents, and he and writer David Scarpa conclude that almost all of these people are craven buffoons. The political moment is built to resemble our own with Napoleon as the Trump figure.

Once you have Napoleon lined up with Trump, the political commentary quickly falls into place (and it’s not like the film tries to hide it as Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) lists off Napoleon’s flaws that sound awfully similar to our 45th President). The film argues that political success isn’t built around savvy or a grasp of the issues, but success in the dominant means of expressing power for that age. For Napoleon, it was war. If you could kill more people on your opponent’s side than your own, you were good at war, and therefore popular. We live in a media age, so if you can command more airtime than anyone else, you can therefore hold onto to power. Similarly, the entrenched aristocracy thought they could use Napoleon to their own ends, he was able to surpass them and discard them.

When you see the political aspects play out, you can see why Phoenix was a great choice for the role since he knows how to sell comedy under the guise of seriousness. It’s not so much that he’s deadpan, but he knows how to get a laugh out of a character who’s in mental distress. At times, his Napoleon plays like a mix of Commodus, his character from Gladiator, and his rival Maximus (Russell Crowe), where you have someone who is perfect on the battlefield, but is simply awful at dealing with people face to face in a context outside of war. So you have these terrific moments of petulance swerving into smug self-satisfaction. Sound like anyone who’s been in the news for the last eight years?

On a historical stage, the lack of change becomes even darker. While the film certainly feels like it’s been hacked down (there’s supposed to be a longer cut coming to AppleTV+ at some point in the future), it still manages to grasp the cruel circularity where the movie opens with the execution of Marie Antoinette and deposing of royalty only to eventually have Napoleon crowned king and married to Marie Louise, who, like Marie Antoinette, came from Austrian royalty because it’s a useful political alliance. The juxtaposition of the brutality of war with the “lol nothing matters” of palace intrigue would be chilling if it weren’t played for some gallows humor.

The third pillar is the film’s weakest, which is the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine. The film never really finds an “in” to that relationship. Do Napoleon and Josephine really love each other? Is it transactional where she smooths out his rougher edges and he takes her along for his ascendancy? Is it a psychosexual tête-à-tête? Or is there a real kinship between two people who know what it’s like to be discarded and overlooked, so they’re driven by a mutual resentment for the world at large? We never really suss it out, and it doesn’t help that Phoenix and Kirby lack chemistry. It feels like we’re watching a clumsy dance between two actors who never got a handle on the turbulent ride between their two characters.

But even here we can see what we saw in The Last Duel, which is that society gifts men the power to craft their own destiny and see themselves in a heroic mold regardless of what actually happened. Even acknowledging Napoleon’s success on the battlefield, the film insists that perhaps, to quote a wise muppet, “Wars not make one great.” Napoleon got a lot of people killed all so he could waste away on an island in the middle of nowhere, thinking of himself as a great romantic hero. Then as now, the darkest joke is how weak men force the rest of us to inhabit their delusions.

What I’m Watching

Starting in 2021, I started a project to watch every Walt Disney Animation Studios movie. With the upcoming release of Wish (as well as this year marking Disney’s 100th anniversary), I figured I’d better get finished. That meant finally going through the studio’s fallow period of the mid-2000s as they made their transition from 2D animation to hop on the CG animation train extremely late in the game compared to Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.

Where you can see the studio hurting is a loss of identity. Brother Bear (2003) is well-intentioned, but it feels like a shadow of far more successful Disney efforts about respecting the wilderness. Home on the Range (2004) plays like something that exists in the background of a real movie. Chicken Little (2005) is an eyesore (I understand CG continues to develop, but Little looks far worse than its contemporaries) as well as a largely inert and dull comedy.

Thankfully, things rebounded with Meet the Robinsons (2007), which, while resting heavily on a Tomorrowland vibe, is delightfully goofy and has a great message about embracing failure as a means of growth. I also revisited Bolt (2008), which I hadn’t seen since it was in theaters, but it remains a cute albeit slight picture.

All that’s left now is to finally watch last year’s Strange World before heading off to see Wish.

What I’m Reading

I finished MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, and as I said in my Goodreads review, I’m probably not the target reader for this book since I followed these events as they were happening when I worked for Collider. I already know a lot of what happened behind the scenes, so the book didn’t have a lot of new information to offer me.

My larger issue with the book is that it doesn’t feel like a particularly strong work of non-fiction as much as it’s a collection of articles arranged by chronology. It feels like in an effort to cover everything that happened or that became associated with Marvel (e.g. VFX houses being overworked or actors reshaping their bodies to look like superheroes), but the authors lost sight of driving forces. Broadly, Kevin Feige is the creative genius at the head of Marvel and someone like Ike Perlmutter is the short-sighted villain, but I never felt like I got a sense of who anyone was beyond these archetypes. For a studio that has held onto the same producers for a while, I couldn’t tell you anything substantial about guys like Stephen Broussard or Louis D’Esposito. Also, despite the wide net, the book still doesn’t really investigate aspects like “Why do so many Marvel movies look ugly?” and “Why are so many of their scores forgettable?” The book touches on this when they point out that Ryan Coogler could bring in his own people for Black Panther rather than using the default Marvel department heads, but that’s about it.

I was rooting for the MCU book because I like the authors, and I think it’s important to examine such a major part of Hollywood filmmaking from the last 15 years. But I believe that this book will ultimately serve as reference material for a better book down the line.

What I’m Hearing

The Kids of Rutherford County wrapped last week, and as expected, it was a bummer. Looking not just at this case but the world at large, whether it’s the prevalence of school shootings or bombing every thing that moves in Gaza, people don’t seem to really are about child welfare if it gets in the way of what they really want. In Rutherford County, thousands of kids had to pay the price because one judge and one warden decided to make up their own rules, and then the county simply had to wait out the consequences. Institutional power rarely pays a price for harming children.