NAPOLEON 15

Lord of war…

‘In hindsight, I could have left the coat at home’

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS TBC APPLE TV+

Before spiralling costs forced him to retreat, Stanley Kubrick famously claimed that his planned Napoleon biopic would be ‘the best movie ever made’.

Ridley Scott hasn’t reached those unimaginable heights with his own account of the French autocrat’s life, but this masterfully marshalled, entertainingly playful historical epic is one of the legendary director’s finest features in almost two decades.

Opening with the macabre execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793, David Scarpa’s smartly focused screenplay covers Napoleon’s life from his careermaking role in ending the Siege of Toulon, to his death in exile on Saint Helena 30 years later. The half a dozen or so battles depicted provide Napoleon with its blockbuster thrills. But the film is as much a character piece about Bonaparte and his voracious wife, Joséphine – their unconventional relationship a public balancing act between power and love.

Abandoning the faux-continentalaccent requirements that made Scott’s House of Gucci almost impossible to take seriously, Phoenix plays the generalturned-emperor in his vanilla American accent, and at the precise nexus between Gladiator’s Commodus and Beau Is Afraid’s titular loser – the source of much of the film’s humour. On the battlefield, he’s commanding and ruthless. At home, he is flustered, buffoonish and hopelessly in thrall to Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby, whose innate confidence is the perfect fit for Napoleon’s troublesome life partner.

While the film clocks in at a little over two and a half hours, there’s an awful lot to fit in, and the approach here is necessarily elliptical. The highlight is undoubtedly the mid-film Battle of Austerlitz, a sequence of extraordinary tension, terror and tactility. Visual effects unquestionably play an integral role in bringing to the screen the battle sequences, with their ferocious cannon fire, thousands of charging cavalrymen and exploding horses. But how satisfying that a film of this scale feels grounded in some semblance of reality.

There is a questionable relationship with historical veracity (Scott has told his critics to ‘get a life’), but in its current form Napoleon can still feel like it’s racing through history. Meanwhile, the essential politicking that unfolds in back rooms isn’t as gripping as when Napoleon and Joséphine’s tabloidworthy marital strife heats up, let alone when the cannonballs start flying. These may be issues that the proposed four-hour director’s cut solves, but even in this already lengthy theatrical form, Napoleon has achieved another resounding victory.

THE VERDICT Epic in scope, intimate in execution, Napoleon is a thrilling, surprisingly funny account of the infamous French Emperor’s rise and fall.