Epic Napoleon: Ridley Scott’s Cinematic Triumph
The Annales School has been proposing the study of history through the interpretation of people’s daily lives, broad social contexts, and the slowness of change processes for almost a century. Ridley Scott does not seem to agree with this trend and adheres to classical historiography, focused on great war events as a tool to narrate the past.
Scott has a passion for the Napoleonic era, as demonstrated by the fact that his first film, ‘The Duelists’ (1977), was set in this period. 46 years later he addresses the biography of such an excessive character in the most academic way, narrating in an orderly and chronological manner the great battles of his military career, which left three million dead throughout Europe.
It begins in 1793, with the beheading of Marie Antoinette and the Siege of Toulon, his first great feat, which catapulted him as a great strategist. We see here a Napoleon who is still timid and with a hoarse voice. Joaquin Phoenix draws the arc of three decades using almost exclusively body language, mutating towards a superb and imperial bearing as his power grows . At times we see in him the Commodo that he already played in ‘Gladiator’ under the orders of Scott, wounded for life by the lack of his father’s approval, sadistic in his sick confusion between instilling fear and provoking admiration, more cruel the more pathetic .
Although here the maternal figure whom we sense as oppressive and, at least in part, responsible for the character’s megalomania is barely glimpsed, missing throughout the film an approach to the origin of Nepoleón’s excessive character and the driving force of his ambition . How we miss a brother José (who would end up being king of Spain) who appears briefly without us seeing him again throughout the film. It seems that the script by David Scarpa (also author of ‘Gladiator 2’) covered a much broader spectrum in order to explain a character who was crowned emperor at the age of 35, and who in the end has proven unfathomable in two hours and a half of footage.
We will most likely see that depth in the more than four-hour long cut that Apple TV will broadcast in the coming months. At the moment, the only thing we know about him is his obsession with Josefina, played by Vanessa Kirby with an excellence on par with ‘Fragments of a Woman’ (2020).
Beyond that addictive relationship there are only battles with a rushed narrative of the geopolitics that happens between one and the other. Yes, what battles. This is precisely where Stanley Kubrick was shipwrecked, as he did not know how to cover the enormous scale of these wars (it seems that Spielberg will use the script that he never shot to make a series). The spectacle offered by these six fights is enormous. Only Austerlitz or Waterloo are worth the price of admission (and the price of parking, and the queue, and everything that theater deniers allude to in order to see the cinema at home).
Scott’s handling of these epic scenes is enormous. What he already did in ‘Gladiator’ twenty-some years ago is repeated here on a larger scale and perfected. Nobody films on huge real sets with hundreds of extras, dozens of horses and no less than 10 cameras like Ridley Scott. It’s been more than 40 years since he filmed ‘Alien’ or ‘Blade Runner’, and here he continues at 86, making a classic and monumental film that returns us to that cinema of the pre-digital effects era.
