Even before it had been released, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon had become unavoidable. Is it historically accurate? How convincing is Joaquin Phoenix? How are the battle scenes? Hang on, did Napoleon Bonaparte really fire some cannons at the Pyramids in Egypt? It has been relentless.
Scott, who is far from publicity-shy, has also been sparring with historians quibbling over certain details, to the delight of the international press. “Were you there? Oh you weren’t there. Then how do you know?” he asked one interviewer.
Another group that has drawn the director’s ire is, er, the French, who brought Bonaparte to the world in the first place. In response to some mixed reviews over the Channel, Scott claimed that “the French don’t even like themselves”.
He may not be entirely wrong, but it is true that French critics have, so far, tended to deviate from their international colleagues. While Napoleon has mostly received glowing reviews in other countries, reactions in the emperor’s old digs have been… well, somewhat more mixed.
In GQ France magazine, Adam Sanchez took issue with Phoenix’s portrayal of the main character, or, as he called it, his “grimacing teenage act”. “His incarnation of Napoleon is like the film: strangely monolithic,” he continued, arguing that by trying to show all the facets of the emperor, Scott ended up making a film that lacked depth.
A perhaps less charitable criticism was centred around the movie’s linguistic choices. “There persists something fundamentally clumsy… and involuntarily funny in seeing a film-maker like Ridley Scott seize a French story by stripping it of its language,” Sanchez wrote. One example he gives is soldiers shouting “Long live France” with an American accent during the siege of Toulon in 1793.
At risk of siding with Scott over my compatriots on this one, I’m not sure what other options the film-maker had. He couldn’t have made a French-speaking movie, and making all characters speak English but in a French accent would have arguably been the worst of both worlds.
Over in Numéro, another culture mag, Violaine Schütz was kinder to the actors, but not the director’s decision to “approach the life, victories and failures of the emperor through the prism of his tormented relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais”. According to her, it made for a “questionable, even tragicomic, bias, despite the impressive performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.”
“What could have been an epic, poignant and grandiose fresco on the history of France and the excessive ambition of a man… most often takes on the trappings of an almost banal love story,” she concluded. So much for the French’s supposed love of romance.
Overall, “the film is neither a Waterloo nor the beautiful Homeric victory that we fantasised about,” Schütz wrote, which is, if nothing else, a wonderfully eloquent way to put it.
Right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro had a similar starting point, but was altogether kinder. “He chose to tell the story of the emperor in the light of his crazy passion for Joséphine de Beauharnais. It’s questionable historically, effective cinematically,” wrote Jean-Christophe Buisson.
In fact, his main issue was with what was missing, and with the natural constraints that come with making a movie. “We would have loved to see the campaigns of Italy, Syria or France, the Dantesque return of the Great Army from Russia, longer moments of complicity between Napoleon and his grunts or his marshals, the farewells of Fontainebleau,” he mused. “But it would have taken four hours, six hours, eight hours.” That may just be too much to ask.
All in all, the picture is a mixed one, though it is unlikely that it will stop Napoleon from becoming a box office hit in France. According to YouGov, just over a quarter of French people (26%) say they would like to see the movie.
As for the real winner of it all, it may well be the original owner of one of Bonaparte’s bicorn hats. Put up for auction just before the movie came out and expected to fetch around €700,000, it ended up being sold for €1.9m (£1.6m). Just be sure to remove it before the movie begins, as you wouldn’t want to block the view of those behind you.
