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Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriter: David Scarpa

By Roderick Heath

It feels obvious, even inevitable, that at some point Ridley Scott would make a film about Napoleon Bonaparte. As subject matter it sees him circling back to where his feature film career began with 1977’s The Duellists, an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story which explored the particular zeitgeist of the Napoleonic era through a microcosmic example of human absurdity. Now Scott returns to the era with all the muscle of experience and budget he’s accrued in the intervening forty-six years. It’s also odds-on that any filmmaker tackling Napoleon as a subject will find themselves compared to him at some point. The director of a film shoot and a military commander have their similarities in marshalling and focusing massed human and technical resources as well as perceived requirements of vigorous personality and authority, and the kind of artistic personality drawn to studying a personality like the Emperor’s may, onlookers suspect, already be inclined to feel glimmers of self-recognition. The Duellists saw Scott offering the first of many genuflections to Stanley Kubrick with a movie made under the immediate spell of Barry Lyndon (1975), but which, subtly and simultaneously, carved out his own niche with very different storytelling rhythms, setting the scene for Scott’s long, violently uneven, yet eternally fascinating and restless career. And of course Kubrick himself wanted to make a film about Napoleon.

Napoleon has, of course, already attracted many and varied movie portraits over the years. Standing above all is Abel Gance’s mammoth 1927 film, a pinnacle of cinematic vision attached to a romanticised portrait of a boding Homeric hero, dusted with the gilt of destiny, even as human pettiness and the illusive power of his own vast dreams, and those others pin upon him, reach out to promise eventual ruin. Clarence Brown’s Conquest (1937), which sported Charles Boyer as Napoleon and Greta Garbo as his lover Maria Walewska, saw the man as a smouldering crusader eaten up by the temptations of megalomania. Sacha Guitry’s Napoleon (1955) presented a sardonic swashbuckler out of place and in revolt against a world of politicking that eventually brings him down. King Vidor’s version of him, inhabited by Herbert Lom in War and Peace (1956), was a swaggering imp for whom martial glory is a religion, and the realities of warfare enacted on the level of blood feud he encounters in invading Russia prove at first humiliating and then relentlessly, ruthlessly tragic. Rod Steiger’s characterisation in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) saw the genius of war and politics inseparable from a cast iron-hard chunk of ego and the nurtured volatility of a cantankerous brat, the need for constant, provoking movement in his mind sometimes meshing properly with gears of effect and sometimes grinding awfully, even as his body begins to let him down. Ian Holm’s edition in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) was the ultimate takedown based on certain psychological theories, presenting him as a literal and figurative small man expressing his frustration and inferiority complex through a passion for the theatre of violence: “Little things hurting each-other – that’s what I like!”

That Scott would not make a film about old Bony at all like Gance’s should be no surprise, but what’s most initially unexpected about his Napoleon is that it’s not really like any of the others, either. Scott’s Napoleon stands in defiance of expectations of what a modern, big-budget prestige film or TV series recounting popular history should act like, when the pseudo-analytic self-seriousness and instant tabloid news-to-profound testament approach of the Peter Morgan school of writing has inflected an entire era of such fare. Rather than revisiting the straightforward martial tragic-heroic pitch of Gladiator (2000), the film that brought Scott back to Oscar-garlanded glory after one of his periodic adventures in distractible genre-hopping, or the ambitious and rarefied mix of old-fashioned epic and new-fashioned flux found in Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Napoleon is an extension of what Scott’s been up to in his late phase, which I trace to starting with American Gangster (2007), to which his Napoleon has no small number of similarities. Like that film, it follows the rise and fall of a cunning but amoral man who, seeing a vacuum of authority, decides to fill it. Like The Last Duel (2021), it mercilessly dissects and mocks the historical action man mythos Scott did so much to exalt in Gladiator. Like House of Gucci (2021), it’s an oddball blend of true crime detail deployment and distorting dark comedy, a portrait of egos and appetites and fractious love-hate expressed through the nominally serious business of business. It even nods back to his revisionist recounting of the legends of Robin Hood (2010) and Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), seeking new facets left unexplored by earlier versions and an equally new sense of what such figures mean in terms of the cultures that produced them versus our culture today.

Scott casts Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, a clear move to reunite a winning team: Scott helped boost Phoenix to stardom with Gladiator, and whilst Phoenix is nearly as old now as Bonaparte was when he died, as an actor he always seems to retain some perpetual aspect of the childlike, playing as he so often does insular weirdoes and volatile antiheroes. It’s a quality Scott puts to work with calculation in Napoleon, to sap the eponymous man of the mystique imbued not simply by his achievements but the layers of mythologising and propagandising that started to work even before he became France’s political as well as military commander with a conscious effort to make him a larger-than-life personage. That Scott has this in mind is made very clear when he notes Jacques-Louis David (Sam Crane) sketching out the scene of Napoleon’s crowning as Emperor whilst it’s occurring, leaving out the mischievous, tall-poppy-felling details Scott invests, like Napoleon discovering that the crown he tries to put on his own head won’t fit over the wrought-gold laurel wreath he’s already wearing, and tries to smoothly pass it off as a choreographed move. This is entirely in keeping with some of the more sarcastic observations of the time, like one of Napoleon’s acquaintances who saw David’s painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps and commented “It looks as much like him as I do.”

Later in the film, when Napoleon meets Tsar Alexander (Édouard Philipponnat), the young and seemingly malleable leader of Russia in a peace overture, Napoleon rattles off an anecdote about a witty remark he’s supposed to have made, only for Alexander to recognise it as a fairly common piece of military folklore, one that’s found in Napoleon a suitable figure to drape itself on, and someone entirely willing to claim it as his own brilliance. The basic proposition of Napoleon is that the man himself wasn’t that much better, nobler, pithier, or more efficacious than contemporary politicians, but he had better taste in self-propagandising. A tension lies in this, of course: recounting the life of a man at once celebrated and reviled as conqueror and liberator, thief and fount, tyrant and hero, murderer and champion, demands contending with those conflicting visions. Scott has plumbed this territory before. His 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) approached the sharply, almost surreally contrasting viewpoints on Christopher Columbus as visionary world-expander and brutal emissary of nascent colonial exploitation. Scott illustrated the schism through one of his familiar duellist figurations – dubious history, perhaps, but it captured something dramatically meaningful as idealist explorer and cynical profiteer battled on the cusp of a new epoch and continent.

Scott touches on something similar with Napoleon, positing the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) as the Emperor’s ultimate nemesis. But Scott resists exalting him as Achilles to Napoleon’s Hector, instead offering Wellington as the revenge of the specifically English kind of snob on a no-class scrub who’s been getting up in everyone’s business for far too long. Indeed, one could say this is precisely Scott’s take on Napoleon: what Wellington did to the Emperor at Waterloo, Scott does with his deflating English scepticism. And yet Bonaparte fits squarely into a mode of hero Scott’s been exploring since Gabriel Feraud and Roy Batty and extending to the likes of Thelma and Louise and Maximus and Frank Lucas – the angry, revanchist antihero clawing a path towards what they imagine is rightful apotheosis and deliverance from degradation, charged with an innate sense of being the rebel angel in a Miltonian universe, but often doomed through failure to think sufficiently and seriously about other, opposing powers and their representatives. Except that Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa do their level best to strip this latest example of any hint of romanticism, whilst still keeping an eye on what he did well.

Tackling a subject as large as Napoleon’s career is, it goes virtually without saying, close to being the very definition of biting off more than a feature filmmaker can chew, just as Alexander the Great’s has proved more than once. Such careers encompass not just dizzying shifts of personal fortune and dramatic attitude for their focal figures, but entire epochs and sensibilities within their thematic gizzards. Tales of ruined and curtailed grandeur understandably resound with Scott: one distinctive aspect of his career has the degree to which so many of his movies have been misshapen by studio interference and editing. Scott’s career has arguably been as much helped by this as hindered: the first reedit of Blade Runner (1982) released in the mid-1990s did much to give him new attention and standing and saw the film promoted from failed blockbuster and cult object to major classic, and the vastly extended version of Kingdom of Heaven similarly enlarged its reputation. Scott, working this time around with the bottomless money pit of Apple’s new filmmaking branch, has finally weaponised this phenomenon, as a much longer version of Napoleon is in the offing for streaming release. The unfortunate side-effect of this sees the theatrical release version is immediately identified as a compromise offering, an incomplete artefact. But this is the one Scott has offered to those who go see it in a movie theatre so damn it, that’s the one I’ll take him up on.

Scott’s opening sequence quickly strikes an off-kilter, aesthetically provocative note, as he depicts the guillotining of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) set to Edith Piaf, a vignette treading the finest of lines between earnest historical theatre and puckish lampoon, the choice of song evoking a sense of linked eras in French folklore and art through creative anachronism. The Queen’s white-painted face and gore-dripping neck are proffered to the crowd: are you not entertained? Some overlap here too with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), a film that resisted showing the Queen’s execution, and also took strong stylistic licence from Scott’s son Jake’s Plunkett and Macleane (1999). Scott and Scarpa, who also wrote the script for Scott’s highly undervalued All The Money In The World (2017), immediately stake the drama in terms of the French Revolution’s punitive mythos, a pageant of chopped heads and felled, effete aristocrats long since transmuted by retelling from the frightening counter-myth wielded by reactionaries for the following century or so into modern pop culture shtick, in our era of online “Eat the Rich” sloganeering from people who’d get suicidal at the thought of going a week without their smart phone. Maximilian Robespierre (Sam Troughton) is identified as a pompous showboat, who will when the Thermidorian reaction comes around try to shoot himself to avoid indignity only to leave himself with a hole in his face for his enemy to prod with pleasure.

Napoleon is first glimpsed, as he was in Gance’s film, as a man in the crowd, but without the special dint of aloof charisma and potency in reserve. For Scott, Bonaparte is less transcendent warrior-poet than an on-the-make man of a specific moment, a sort of historical entrepreneur who sees a gap in the market and fills it with a needed product, that product being military success. Scott’s fascination for detail in process is perfectly attuned to communicating Napoleon’s cunning as a fighter, illustrated in the first of the film’s major battle set-pieces with a depiction of him leading the assault on the British garrison in Toulon, which he first scouts out personally under the guise of a shepherd. During the assault, in which he takes advantage of the general British disdain for the current state of the French as well as displaying all the technical nuance and effectiveness a well-trained soldierly mind and body can bring to bear, Napoleon survives having his horse shot out from under him by a cannon ball – a jarring, effectively gruesome moment – and after victory digs out the ball from the horse’s corpse as a memento for his mother. Napoleon earns admiring, even awestruck looks from his men, signalling the institution of a reputation that completely inverts the same image of Marie Antoinette being dragged through the cleaved, disdaining crowd: here is popular leadership sourced in success and esteem, the most solid possible basis for political fortune, and the most dangerous.

Expanding on this idea, Scott portrays events usually skimmed or elided in other such portraits, in the way Napoleon first became a political operator as well as military hero, or rather, turned politics into a military arena, in vignettes sketched out with a dark and unexpected comic sensibility. Napoleon’s role in putting down the Royalist Vendémiaire insurrection of 1795 is portrayed with Scott’s unblinking eye for his subject’s unblinking eye: Napoleon’s ripe willingness to use direct, merciless force to suppress the uprising with the infamous “whiff of grapeshot.” For Scott this episode is as important as it is often skimmed over – Gance, for instance, depicted Napoleon’s call to arms and the aftermath but avoided actually depicting it, but it accords with Scott’s greater scepticism and now-familiar interest in systemic acts. Here, drawn from history, is a precisely identifiable moment when one man established himself as a judicious wielder of power, and with a coherent corollary: if his predecessors in the course of the Revolution, in any faction, had shown the same gift, they would have become Napoleon Bonaparte, or some version of him that now fills history books. But that sense of force writes in red ink, sprayed on the Parisian cobblestones.

Later, Napoleon departs for his epic-absurd excursion to Egypt, where the grand spectacle of civilisations in immediate confrontation is described with an ideogram of satiric precision as Napoleon’s artillery resounds in the face of an advancing Egyptian army and a cannon ball clips the peak of a pyramid. Scott depicts the machinations of the Brumaire coup, in which Napoleon, in league with Roger Ducos (Benedict Martin) and Joseph Fouché (John Hodgkinson) and with the help of Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim), deposed the ruling Directory and established himself as First Consul, the first major step towards becoming national dictator. The coup is again delivered as a comic spectacle, drawing humour from the way it paints Napoleon as in his element in bringing his tactical mind to bear and manipulating a situation, making it look like he’s been roughed up by the Directory members with a show of breathless escape, so as to more easily deploy and reassure the soldiers he has waiting to storm the building that they’re in the right. Thus he creates the impression that he is the truest representative and saviour of the Revolution even as he’s actually betraying it and suborning it to dictatorship.

Scott’s admiration for David Lean, most particularly Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is as constant a motif for him as Kubrick. And yet, despite the superficial epicism Napoleon is not a reach for Leanian grandeur, not in theme nor in style. Rather than seeing Napoleon as a would-be titan in the Lawrence mode, doomed by his inability to convert ideals into facts in a corrosive world, Scott characterises him far more like the title character of Barry Lyndon, one of Kubrick’s many fools of fortune cut off from the pleasures of power that can only be wielded by authentic brutes. Feels very likely, too, that Scott has more recent likenesses in political theatre and fury in mind. This is a Napoleon for our era of social media-inflated populists and authoritarians who, partly through design and partly through vagaries of fortune, become lodestones for other people’s passions and prejudices, battle lines drawn between the “us” such figures court and capture, and the perfidy of whichever “them” arouses special ire. The great archaeological enterprise that Napoleon sponsored during the expedition, forming the roots of Egyptology, is noted but also viewed askance, as Napoleon finds himself compelled by a mummy propped up after being dug up. The sight of the ancient, wizened body, a tilt by one society at achieving immortality, taunts a man starting to hear the same siren song, only for the mummy to listlessly lean over under his hard and searching scrutiny; in that end all that’s left is a well-dressed corpse. Scott contrasts this tug of grandiosity with the messy reality of a would-be overlord who has neither house nor nation in order.

When it comes to making this sort of movie, filmmakers have in essence three choices: one is the general explanatory portrayal pitched to those who don’t know much about the epoch and personalities under scrutiny, and hitting each vital beat succinctly. Another is the more impressionistic approach, usually counting some level of familiarity of the general run of events in the viewer and toggling associatively through vivid fragments. Many biopics of recent vintage tend to limit their scope to refine some essence of a famous person’s life, through capturing a pivotal moment or a portrait from a specific viewpoint. Napoleon hews closest to the first approach, but flirts with all three. Anyone going into the film expecting a sober, steady expostulation of history will find it a patchy, frustrating, tonally bewildering affair as it stands. The narrative leapfrogs over the period between Napoleon becoming First Consul and Emperor, and from there to his invasion of Russia in a few scenes, encompassing as that period does all the apparently trifling business of his grand battles for Italy and Germany and Spain, as well as Trafalgar. It’s all enough to make me particularly frustrated that filmmakers don’t do old-school explanatory montages anymore, the kind of technique that can compress great swathes of information and action into brief and dynamic representations.

A lot of political to-ing and fro-ing is noted, with Talleyrand (Paul Rhys) engaging in deft diplomatic manoeuvrings where his master tends to stamp heavily, but without any cumulative sense of contrapuntal meaning. The other personalities of the era, including Napoleon’s brace of legendary marshals and even Talleyrand himself, one of those figures cloaked in delight by generations of political and historical observers, or Fouché, whom Scott ingeniously employed Albert Finney to impersonate in The Duellists, are only vaguely identified, the equivalents, in Scott’s eye, of the kinds of second-tier hoods who comprise the foot soldiers going out to the whacking in a Scorsese or Coppola gangster movie. Later on, Louis XVIII (Ian McNeice) is seen installed in Napoleon’s place after his first abdication, and I felt actively sorry for all the who’s-that-guy? audience members wondering who he is and where he came from. Rahim makes an impression as Barras, the cunning operator who orchestrates Robespierre’s downfall and becomes Napoleon’s mentor in politics before being brushed aside, and the film notes the intriguing sight of General Dumas (Abubakar Salim) as one of Napoleon’s confederates, a Black Haitian (and later father of the writer Alexandre) evincing the first glimmers of new social horizons. The trouble is that after pursuing the political theme early on in the film, Scott seems to feel it exhausts itself once Napoleon becomes First Consul. Or, rather, he transmutes one way of exploring the theme into another.

The focus then falls on one of the most famous yet opaque marriages in history, that between Napoleon and Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), whose course is seen as intimately woven with the general rise and fall of Napoleon’s fortunes and continues to define them even after it’s technically ended, and it’s this marriage Scott and Scarpa identify as exemplifying something about the age as well as the characters locked in it. Joséphine is first glimpsed being released from prison at the end of the Reign of Terror, a pathetic figure with crudely shorn hair and soiled clothes, as if she’s stumbled out of the rehearsal-turned-orgy in Marat / Sade (1966). Soon she’s invited to one of the Survivors’ Balls held for raucous celebrations by those who escaped the national razor, a vignette of lewd and raucous entertainment in a moment of supremely licentious release for those who have survived political terror and still enjoying a moment before the old morality kicks back in. There she encounters Napoleon, whose lovestruck gaze lingers on her until she confronts him for it: all he can do is bleat about his capture of Toulon, something she only gets amusement from at first, but quickly seizes upon her connection with the odd young officer in realisation he could be a star worth hitching her wagon to, and vice versa, given her connections in high society.

Scott trots out the vignette of Joséphine’s son Eugene (Benjamin Chivers) approaching Napoleon to beg for his executed father’s sword, but with a twist that invests this tale with a new meaning. Napoleon moves to oblige the lad, only to be confronted with rack after racks of similarly impounded swords, none of them marked according to owner. Again, in one efficient gesture Scott conveys the nature of the Reign of Terror as leaving holes in the shape of so many dead men persisting only as myths of martial glory and lost legacy, and delivers a punchline wherein Napoleon selects a random sabre to give to the De Beauharnais. It’s both his ticket into Joséphine’s household, and also an ironic self-description, as one sword is as good as another, and he’s the sword currently being offered: Napoleon explicitly characterises himself elsewhere as merely a handy sword. Joséphine sits and talks with Napoleon, and, making her play, calmly opens her legs invitingly to him, in a gesture that’s as much a challenge as an act of seduction. Later, Joséphine weighs up her feelings in with her chambermaid, and quickly concludes that whilst her affection for him is much less than his for her, she cares enough for him to go ahead with a union that becomes for both a perverse thicket. Like Gance, Scott sees Napoleon’s swooning ardour for Joséphine as part and parcel with his most fervent conquering zest in the opening phase of his career, but in a completely different way. Their union delivers wealth and splendour, as Joséphine swans through swank abodes that become the trappings of high office and joins her husband in the forbidden delights of fucking in once-royal beds. Napoleon enjoys the servicing of his raw lust, which manifests on a virtually infantile level, as he inveigles her to congress with childish noises and prostrate her for jackhammering sex sessions.

Such episodes ram home (sorry) Scott’s scornful take on the macho warrior ethos he offers Napoleon as exemplifying (which might be rather unfair in this case, as being bad at sex never seemed to be one of Napoleon’s problems, given the historical record of Napoleon’s relations with his second wife Mary-Louise) in a manner that clearly extends The Last Duel’s concern with such things. At the same time it twists away from that film’s straightforward and blistering sense of historical righteousness towards something more ambivalent, if still with an eye for the egregious. Joséphine is every bit as wayward and lusty a personality as her husband, and the tug of war between their mutually complicit egos and anxieties defines their marriage, to the point where Napoleon storms home to France, leaving his army in Egypt in the lurch, after hearing about Joséphine’s affair with hunky young officer Hippolyte Charles (Jannis Niewöhner), and her dalliances become the stuff of proto-tabloid news feasting. Napoleon returns to his home with Joséphine only to find her out for the day, further stoking his rage and leading him to dump all of her belongings out on the front lawn. Joséphine becomes panicky upon seeing this on her return, and the night and following day become an extended playlet of ritualised domination and submission amidst a stew of fierce and contradictory feelings, first with Napoleon fiercely extracting expressions of undying fidelity and respect, and then her from him: “You are nothing without me” is a catechism each makes the other repeat in turn.

This part of the film, which continues the playful, satirically skewed aspect of the film’s take on the historical record, is nonetheless very much central to what Scott’s take on Napoleon is aiming for, a quest that traces the outlines of the old canard that “behind every great man is a good woman,” tested and smelted and recast as a similar but distinct idea, one that traces out the way ambitious, spiky personalities seek same with all the potential and pain that can result. Napoleon’s subsequent confrontation with the grandees of the Directory, who try to criticise him for abandoning his army in Egypt, sees him fiercely turn the tables in noting their incompetence and mismanagement, rattling off a series of denunciations concluding with, “And I’ve just learned that my wife is a slut!,” one of the most unexpectedly hilarious lines in recent cinema. Moreover, it nudges the connection of the course of the marriage to the course of Napoleon’s career, suggesting Napoleon’s conviction that both Joséphine and France are inconstant lovers easily distracted by louche poseurs and needing his firm rod to keep both in line, but to which he remains fatefully tethered. Or, from the opposite perspective, that Napoleon is at once a gallant deliverer and petty thug for both. Joséphine plays her part right down the line, up to and including falling on her metaphorical, matrimonial sword for the good of the nation, and she retains a quality that refuses reduction, unlike the other players in the drama, to organs of Napoleon’s will and ego, and that’s precisely because he does actually feel something for her. But those feelings are not simple or reassuring.

The fascination for the political apparent in the personal is one of Scott’s recurring points of obsession and inquiry, and he nails the fascination for such dynamics in these portions of Napoleon. Napoleon readily confesses his affairs after reacting with specially aggrieved passion when he finds Joséphine has been doing the same: the old double standard, of course, except that the couple talk about it all during their long session of dirty laundry-airing that becomes a vital ritual in their evolving relationship. The idea of a Napoleon who’s a total cuck is a neat provocation to the current cult obsessed with masculine esteem, but the film gropes through that to another, more substantial perspective: the reason these two people are locked together by fate and emotion is precisely because they’re not normal, or “relatable” as the awful current phraseology has it, even if they are still nonetheless very human. As Joséphine’s incapacity to conceive a child threatens the Bonapartes’ proto-dynastic ambitions, however, her position becomes increasingly endangered, and finally Napoleon feels obliged to divorce her. The divorce comes in a ceremony that becomes a second, rather more gruelling act of public theatre after the coronation they shared in together, this time a stew of sardonic disbelief and squirming frustration, with Napoleon dealing a quick slap to Joséphine’s face in trying to get her back on message, the film’s most grimly amusing contemplation of personal life and statecraft fused in a sickly dance.

The lead actors are at their finest in these scenes, Phoenix’s smouldering, frustrated Napoleon matching Kirby’s mesmeric evocation of an intelligence that doesn’t quite mesh as much as Joséphine would like to think with her emotional identity: both are undone by their needy and compulsive streaks and the way neither quite has a substantial identity without the other. Late in the film, during Napoleon’s first deposing and exile, Alexander visits the ailing Joséphine out of nominal gentlemanly courtesy and furtive intrigue, but with the subtext that Joséphine’s bed, or heart, or more nebulous domain of kingmaking talent, or all at once, are further battlegrounds these conquering overlords need to compete upon and test themselves against. Earlier, and in stark contrast, Napoleon’s mother Letizia (Sinéad Cusack) sets about attending to the dynastic problem by arranging for her son to sleep with a selected and willing partner, to find out whether her lad is shooting blanks in the boudoir if not on the battlefield: he quickly gets the appointed concubine knocked up, opening the door to the divorce. This hints heavily at where Napoleon gets his tactical zest and hearty absence of any kind of sentimentality, but also signals Letizia operates with a clearer head than her son, at least in terms of what she’s aiming for and how to get to it. It’s a pity Cusack’s mommy dearest doesn’t appear more in the film. Once the divorce is done, Napoleon promptly weds the young and eager Mary-Louise (Anna Mawn), with Napoleon greeting her and swiftly leading her on to the bedroom: sex is what they’re both here for, in several senses.

The side of Scott that retains skills honed in making British television and the tradition of the docudrama – a facet of the director that has long sat in tension with his florid, decorative, world-conjuring side – has come to the fore repeatedly in his career, underpinning the woozy blend of reportage and you-are-there sturm-und-drang of Black Hawk Down (2001) and more completely on American Gangster. Napoleon seems like a perfect fit for this, and yet again Scott demurs. Instead, Napoleon proves to actually be an entry in a style of historical film that doesn’t get made much – generally because it’s proven highly unpopular with audiences and a zone of confusion for critics – and also peculiarly British. A style exemplified by the likes of Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976), Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), Plunkett and Macleane, Julien Temple’s Pandemonium (2000), and much of Ken Russell’s oeuvre – one could also nod to the likes of Richard Lester and Monty Python for more outright comedic variations. Unstable films where the familiar impulses of such movies, springing from the moment of the 1960s counterculture and later promising and blending with the impulses of punk, with their fascination for famous historical personalities and realism in recreating milieu, sit cheek by jowl was a sense of the ridiculous, located in awareness of disparity in viewpoint, and skit-like, semi-satiric attitude, with attempts to connect the modern sensibility with the period with aspects of ironic juxtaposition and poetic licence that tries to dig to something truer than what mere fact can convey.

It makes sense that Scott would have some sympathy with that style, coming as he did out of the same era and sensibility that shaped the likes of Russell and Richardson, at once finding themselves heirs to a cultural and artistic tradition and also rebels against it, looking for the down and dirty amidst all the gilt and froufrou, the proof of continuity in human nature even as history moved from veiling its primal impulses to letting it all hang out. And whilst he’s long seemed more of a straight arrow than the likes of Russell, in fact it can be said that Scott’s oeuvre has long been defined by the peculiar, personal spin he put on that kind of artistic sensibility – that he might even have always been the most sophisticated exponent of it. That’s most overt in the arch blend of genres and styles in Blade Runner in particular, veering as it does between sci-fi and noir, classical and futuristic, the exalted and the fetid, all putting the punk in cyberpunk, and elsewhere in his career he’s been fond of such juxtapositions, if usually in more subtle or purely stylistic ways. Napoleon is a long way from being as bold in its juxtapositions of technique and tone as The Charge of the Light Brigade or Savage Messiah (1972), but a sense of common roots nonetheless keeps bobbing to the surface. Scott boils down Napoleon’s march on Moscow to a spectacle of self-defeat, with the Emperor inheriting the hollow trappings of Alexander’s authority, and a deserted city he can’t even claim credit for burning down.

That Scott is also thinking back to his debut is palpable in places throughout Napoleon, recreating the method apparent in The Duellists for recreating historical milieu, particularly the hollowed-out environs of the revolution-pilfered great houses and institutions, and even recreates some shots here and there. Scott dismissed Waterloo before making this film, and as a great admirer of Bondarchuk’s movie the temptation to a little cackle of contumely is hard to resist, in noting how Scott fails to match that film’s pungency as both war spectacle and character sketch, even if he is aiming at something quite different. Nonetheless the two grand battle sequences, the first depicting Austerlitz, the second Waterloo, that subdivide the drama, are two of Scott’s greatest feats of filmmaking, as he tries to encapsulate the complex ebb and flow of action in those battles as units of expressive and coherent diagramming, particularly in the contrast of Napoleon expertly suckering in his foes in the first battle and flailing surrendering to his own macho mythos as well as Wellington’s traps in the second. Austerlitz is illustrated with particular verve, Scott wielding watchmaker precision in the outlay of cause and effect, capturing Napoleon’s capacity to see through the superficial chaos of the battlefield to both see and wield designs amidst it all. The battle climaxes with the infamous shelling of the iced-over lake the luckless Austrian and Russian soldiers try to flee across, the climax of Alexander Nevsky (1938) recast from heroic consummation as nature conspires with great leader to swallow the alien host, to a supervillain’s wickedest flourish of contempt for a defeated foe.

Simultaneously registering as both problematic and fruitful, Scott’s Napoleon emerges as feeling like two or three different movies, each competing for primacy – the post-punk satire, the intimate portrait of a weird power couple, and the epic war movie delivered with all of Scott’s most earnest and technically dynamic impact. Episodes of ribald humour graze against straight-faced depictions of brutal combat and fastidious politics. In this regard Napoleon recalls his Robin Hood, which had a similarly, internally divided and clashing structure, albeit an interesting one that disassembled the Robin Hood legend to then resituate it at a junction of real history and folklore rooted in specific cultural soil, recasting the famous hero as the epitome of plebeian English liberty fighting bullies foreign and domestic. Napoleon by contrast never quite finds a way of negotiating its disparities of portrait: if it applied a formal device, like what Christopher Nolan tried (if badly) in Oppenheimer (2023), or indeed as Scott did in The Last Duel, to establish the notion that Napoleon looks like a completely different person from different angles, that might be fine.

Napoleon’s career contains multitudes enough for any biographer – the man who brought French Revolutionary ideals and political liberalism to European politics also stole and conscripted mercilessly, the champion of liberty also tried to toss the Haitians back in chains, and the urges that pushed him to such irreconcilable ends, again usually elided or oversimplified in film takes, cry out for a substantively engaged portrait. In a lot of ways this Napoleon settles for the least interesting version of the man that can be offered. But, again, that might be partly mistaking what this Napoleon wants to be, which can be summarised most concisely as a portrait of power as inherently absurd, especially when completely invested in a person, even if the results of it being wielded are anything but funny. Napoleon Bonaparte is just the historical vessel the thesis is poured into. The film ends with Napoleon, sitting out his exile on St Helena with his two daughters, dying whilst writing his memoirs – Scott films the silhouette of the man wearing his signature hat slowly keeling over, mimicking the dried-out mummy he gazed on earlier.

Here lies both ultimate absurdity, the great conqueror just another uniform without a body to hold it up anymore, at once a sight of pathos, but also one from which the contrived mystique is allowed to escape and haunt history evermore. Scott might well feel some empathy there, as that’s also the kind of immortality the artist plays for, to leave behind traces of themselves in the works they have wrought. The final tally of the dead from Napoleon’s battles and campaigns that rolls afterwards plays as a miniature self-critique of the list of terrorist actions at the end of Black Hawk Down: from cautionary tale about inaction to cautionary tale about too much action. Napoleon is a big, woozy, unusual film that’s never less than extremely entertaining and absorbing even when it’s also being extraordinarily frustrating. As a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, it’s a haphazard affair; as an extension of Scott’s late career obsessions, an ironic study in being human even when affecting to transcend that state, it’s something like a triumph. Whatever else one might say about Scott as he keeps pushing back the horizon of his career in defiance of his age, Napoleon is a film that refuses to conform to clichés about a filmmaker’s autumnal phase – compared to the way that, say, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) exemplifies that concept, for all its excellence. The messiness of Napoleon is a by-product of its wayward ambition, and in that regard, yes, Scott earns comparison with his subject.