Napoleon: Ridley Scott puts English touch on famous French emperor

The Académie Française could be forgiven for having conniptions. Then, to further complicate the national traits, he gives the lead role to Joaquin Phoenix, which means the most famous Frenchman after Aznavour delivers every line in an American drawl. 

So far, so inauthentic. But, as so often happens with historical epics, no omissions or additions really matter, so long as the imagination is there to overcome the inaccuracy.

Imaginative power

One of Gance's minor triumphs was to depict Napoleon's childhood. In one brilliant scene, the boy organises a snowball fight with all the commanding genius of the future leader of vast armies. That this scene was almost certainly apocryphal matters, not a jot. I saw Napoléon, all three and a half hours of it, some 40 years ago, and the scene has lodged itself in my memory ever since. 

That said, it's not always the case that departures from historical fact contribute to a film's imaginative power. Some of Napoleon's recorded utterances would undoubtedly have helped Gance, but he was confined to clunky subtitles, which would interrupt the action. In Scott's hyper-modern, hugely expensive production, the best lines have also been forgotten. This Bonaparte is almost as tongue-tied as Gance's.  

Also, the alterations appear at times perverse. It is well known that Napoleon took archaeologists with him to Egypt, so keen was he to understand its ancient civilisation, yet without wishing to spray my review with spoilers (the trailer is not so discreet), there is something very odd about what he decides to do to the pyramids.

Nor is this where the oddness ends.

Egypt appears to have an effect on the Frenchman much like it had on the Roman Marc Antony, though without the excuse of Cleopatra, a woman who, by most accounts, no red-blooded Frenchman could ever have kicked out of bed for eating croissants.

Even in the absence of a bewitching Queen of the Nile, our bewitched Gallic visitor is overawed. We first sense this in a scene that quotes Jean-Léon Gérôme's picture of Napoleon standing before the sphinx.

It is like a mirror image of monumental greatness. The sphinx's headgear even takes on the appearance of a depressed bicorne hat.

Soon afterwards, however, there is an enigmatic scene in which Phoenix witnesses a sarcophagus being opened to reveal a mummified pharaoh. The general astonishes all the officers around him by bending an ear towards the pharaoh's mouth, as if to receive reports from the afterlife.

Hearing nothing, he then reaches a hand towards the pharaoh's face, at which point the deceased almost falls out of his box. Now, even at the best of times, this new Napoleon is taciturn. Here, the script gives us no way of understanding the hero's behaviour. We are left to interpret his stony expression as we wish.     

Departure from history

But the film's boldest departure from historical record is in its treatment of the great man's love life. When I heard Vanessa Kirby had been cast in the role of Josephine, I wondered how any male actor could carry off the "Not tonight!" line.

Unsurprisingly, that was another famous utterance that didn't make it to the final cut. But anyway, there is a perversity to the depiction of the famous love affair that manages to make both lovers extraordinarily unattractive.

I may have misremembered Napoleon saying "look at the toads!" as his men died in their hundreds on the battlefield. It's quite possible, however, to imagine Ridley Scott feeling the same contempt – not for his extras, pretending to die in their hundreds, but for his leading couple, as their careers died before his very eyes.

Critics always try to assess the "chemistry" in these pairings. These two interact exactly as if the Bunsen burner has yet to be invented.

As various people have already pointed out, Kirby is far too young for the part. The actual Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.

Could it be that this, rather than an unorthodox habit the cinematic Napoleon has of making love fully-clothed – and of begging for relief with faintly ridiculous whimpering noises – is the chief reason behind her failure to give the 'Corsican upstart' an heir?

The point is not a pettifogging complaint such as one might hear from a pesky historian. Authenticity really is of no importance to a film, so long as its imaginative world makes sense and gives us what films are there to provide: entertainment.

The problem such meddling with the known facts presents for Kirby's portrayal of Josephine is that we cannot explain her inability to conceive except as some terrible affliction, and this despite the fact that she already has two children by another man, though the film prefers not to remind us of this till Josephine's untimely death from diphtheria. 

Venerable tradition

It's arguable that her lover's buffoonery has a venerable tradition behind it. Even his greatest admirers had their doubts. Beethoven, who had rashly dedicated a whole symphony to Napoleon, thought that his self-crowning as emperor diminished the man and crossed out the dedication.

William Hazlitt, one of his few English admirers, had a tiny bust of Bonaparte on his desk, as if subconsciously concurring with the composer. Most remarkably of all, Napoleon's nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, had a colossal statue of his arch-enemy by Canova brought across the Channel and installed at the foot of his stairs in Apsley House.

It's still there. The very bulk of it, coupled with its nakedness, has the paradoxical effect of cutting the duke's adversary down to size.

Despite – or perhaps, because of – his obvious pre-eminence as a military strategist, an air of the ridiculous has always clung to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Yet his shortness, for instance, and the nickname of the little corporal, seem to have been based on nothing more convincing than a difference between French inches and British ones. Owing to this misunderstanding, James Gillray portrayed 'Boney' as a diminutive and excitable individual, carving a European-sized slice out of a pudding, while his English counterpart, a lanky William Pitt, carved his own piece on the opposite side of the table.

So convincing was the caricature of the little corporal that he even has a syndrome named after him. Vast swathes of the workforce know exactly what it's like to work for a small man with a Napoleon complex. Who knows, there may be members of the present cabinet in Britain who feel this way about Rishi Sunak.

No one would expect the English to have broken the habit of a national lifetime by taking Napoleon seriously. After all, we've yet to kick the habit of executing Guy Fawkes.

So, it should come as no shock to discover that Ridley Scott, an English director, finds it as difficult as earlier humourists to suppress his giggles.

Yet by casting Joaquin Phoenix as the great general and forcing us to witness some of the most awkward love scenes in cinematic history, Scott is surely succumbing to temptation of an order reminiscent of Gillray's: a resort to outrageous bawdy.

Obvious risks

The obvious risk here is that things get out of control, and we swing from the grim epic tone of vast battles scenes to the bedroom farce of Carry on Boney without ever settling on the genre that fits. And verily I say unto you, dear reader, this is exactly what happens; the film becomes the pudding in danger, with tragedy carving out one large chunk of it and comedy the other.

Judging by his bedroom etiquette, this Napoleon has spent far too much time around horses. As a big fan of Kirby's portrayal of the young Princess Margaret in The Crown, it pained me to see her undoubted sex appeal so gratuitously diminished.

The diminution began with her appearance in the crowd at a theatre. She looked unkempt, and one was bound to query whether there really was so much cleavage around in post-Revolutionary Paris. If so, perhaps Victorian values have had a bad press.

On the next occasion, Napoleon finds her seated at a card table. As we shall see, furniture has a lot to answer for in this film. After noticing that a man in a uniform has been staring at her, fixedly, for most of the evening, Josephine challenges him to explain himself.

It's a toss-up whether her dishevelled hair or her general deshabille is most responsible for his fixation. Perhaps her hair, for reminding him of nothing so much as Marie Antoinette's, as she was driven in a tumbrel to the guillotine.

But commenting on either her hair or her dress sense would rob the moment of romantic intensity, and Old Boney is nothing if not intense. In fact, staring fixedly is one of his specialities.  

In former times, the role would have suited John Wayne: lots of time spent on horseback, a man's man, a tough cookie of few words. Even the drawl would have come naturally to Wayne.

Who knows, at some future date, the technology will be such that John Wayne can finally play Napoleon, though that being said, the time will also come when Napoleon himself can play Napoleon, and then we can all pack up and go home.

But that much is strictly for the distant future, after the advances of artificial intelligence have been paused for a whole six months.

Returning to the scene with the card table, Boney tells her, in a somewhat brusque manner, not to reveal her name.

I guess as a chat-up line, telling the object of your affections to preserve her anonymity worked every time back then, in a passive-aggressive kind of way. It wasn't just the standards of hairdressing that had taken a hit from the Terror.

Conversation, especially with the ladies, is not something Boney has ever, well, boned up on. So, when he finally wins her round sufficiently to be sitting at the same table for a quiet drink, and after brusquely suggesting she come closer, he's too impatient to wait for a reply.

Instead, he simply grabs her chair and hauls it closer to his. Poor Vanessa is almost thrown off it. We are so easily unsettled nowadays. Josephine, one suspects, would have taken such brusqueness in her stride.

Romance and horseplay

The subsequent romance is bedevilled by furniture, whether it be the beds Vanessa is compelled to lean across in acts of love or the table she is dragged under for the same purpose. It's farcical, but this randy emperor cannot see a clean tablecloth without mistaking it for bedsheets.

The horseplay on this occasion involves tipping his lover's seat back with her on it. Then, indifferent to the servants standing mutely by the skirting board, Boney crawls right under the long table and hauls Josephine off her chair. At this point, Vanessa – still hanging onto her character by the seat of her Napoleonic skirt – exclaims, "Oh my God!"

There are times, like this, when Ridley Scott must – must, surely – be playing the relationship for laughs, yet you sense the discomfort of the actors, as if they haven't been entirely let in on the joke. Are we witnessing a great Romantic romance, or a comical romp worthy of an English cartoonist?

It's easy enough for Phoenix, as his answer to the riddle of Bonaparte is to portray one emotion, that of martial solemnity, over and over again. Even when he is feeling hornier than a bicorne hat, he does not have to utter actual words.

Instead, he whimpers in a way so pathetic that it seems designed to turn any woman off. Whether this whimpering does it for Josephine, however, is unclear. I don't have extensive knowledge to back me up here, but these noises might also be something Napoleon picked up in a stable, among horses of the most distinguished pedigree, but that doesn't mean they make Phoenix sound like a stud.

Oddly enough, an Irishman once said of the Duke of Wellington (here played economically by Ruper Everett): 'To be sure he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.' Nor, for that matter, did it make him the Messiah. Is it possible, nonetheless, that Wellington's own lovers had to accustom themselves to pre-coital whinnying? Or perhaps it was just something a girl learnt to accept when dating any random member of the cavalry.   

So, I shall leave it to the reader to decide whether this film makes a bust of the great man as ridiculous in its way as the kind one could fit on one's mantelpiece.

It may just be a question of what mood you take into the cinema with you. In a certain frame of mind, the entire experience could be among the funniest you've ever had, as if scripted by Mel Brooks, though not in his prime. That's the mood I will make sure I'm in, should I ever decide to watch it a second time.

Epic battle scenes

The alternative is to sleep through the sections where Napoleon is being soppy and focus on the battles, because when he is not embarrassing his actors with yet another clumsy romp among the furnishings, Ridley Scott gives his whole attention to these scenes.

And what scenes they are.

So good, one is tempted to rate them in order of excellence. I have no hesitation in pronouncing Austerlitz the best one. Or was it Borodino? Anyway, it was the one involving ice, which was even chillier than the scenes from the abortive march on Saint Petersburg.

Waterloo was pretty good too, as battle reenactments go, though I do think Rupert might have tried a little harder with his Wellington impersonation. Perhaps he had his own qualms about the script. Or else, given the singular lack of nuance in Phoenix's performance, he was being careful not to upstage his fellow actor.

The finest moment, the big gag line that this Napoleon gives us, is not about replacing all those troops in one night in the brothels of Paris, surely the real general's funniest and most callous quip. Instead, it comes when he is confronted with an English diplomat. "You think you're so great," he sneers, "because you have some boats."

That actually got a laugh in the cinema. It was the word 'boats' that tickled the English audience. No doubt the diplomat, being an undemonstrative fellow, felt it was unnecessary to reply, "Well, yes, old chap, we have some very good ships.

Perhaps if you'd spent less time playing with the furniture, you could have been building a decent navy. But then, as Marc Antony's fate demonstrates, even the shrewdest generals can be brought down by a soft spot for some young filly.