“How could you care so little for me and my feelings?” improbably asks Joaquin Phoenix’s two-dimensional Napoleon Bonaparte in Sir Ridley Scott’s execrable new biopic of the megalomaniacal French ruler. In that cringeworthy moment, Napoleon is addressing his first wife and greatest love Joséphine, played by a squalid and unappealing Vanessa Kirby, who has been unfaithful to him by indulging in an affair with the pretty young officer Hippolyte Charles. “I’m sorry,” she lamely replies, completing only one of the many banal exchanges in David Scarpa’s witless script.
Bad screenwriting is a Hollywood commonplace today, but Scott’s attempt at an epic falls on bad history and rarely rises. The exchange above occurs after Napoleon returned from his ill-fated Egyptian campaign, simply, we are led to believe, out of petulance at receiving the news of his wife’s indiscretion. In reality, he returned—long after learning of the affair and pursuing one of his own that the film leaves out—to avoid the years of brutal captivity that awaited the 55,000 men he callously abandoned in the Middle East after the British destroyed his fleet and checked his invasion of Palestine. Contrary to the film’s storyline, but as one might suspect, Napoleon and Joséphine’s relationship was never the same. And while he was in Egypt, no matter how great his frustrations, he certainly did not use his artillery to blast the top off the Great Pyramid.
Would that this were Scott’s only moment of deficient storytelling. The inaccuracies are so numerous and so glaring that an entire film could be made to document its errors alone. “Get a life,” Scott reportedly said in response to the popular British historian Dan Snow’s criticism of the film on factual grounds. “Get an education,” is what I would retort to Scott, whose palpably bad picture is merely the latest failed attempt to capture the French ruler on film after nearly a century of failed attempts. Even with a budget of $200 million and every technological innovation at his disposal, Scott’s effort pales in comparison with Abel Gance’s eponymous 1927 silent film, which follows Napoleon from his school days as a Corsican outsider to the first flowering of his military celebrity.
Napoleon is one of the most documented men ever to have walked the earth. It has been plausibly suggested that only Jesus Christ has had more written about him. Reading just one of the major scholarly biographies to come out in English in the last half century—by Vincent Cronin, Alan Schom, Alan Forrest, Michael Broers, Adam Zamoyski, and Andrew Roberts—would have spared the director much embarrassment. To name only the most glaring flaws, Italy was not surrendered “without a fight,” as the film’s Napoleon writes Joséphine from Egypt. In fact, Napoleon’s campaign there made him a figure of international importance who not merely commanded France’s only successful army at the time but breached protocol by negotiating a peace settlement unauthorized by his government.
Napoleon’s history with Joséphine—a central theme of the film between Scott’s sprawling but shallow battle scenes—is fundamentally wrong. They did not meet casually at some sort of retro version of a Southern California cocktail party, but through the Directory leader Paul Barras, who kept Joséphine as a mistress for a time but later professed boredom with her. Barras appears fleetingly in the film as an earnest national leader, but Napoleon’s betrayal of him to seize power in the Brumaire coup of November 1799 is strictly political.
Napoleon’s ultimate divorce from Joséphine also has a more interesting factual history than the film’s bastardization of their relationship suggests. He did not divorce her after the Battle of Austerlitz, in December 1805, but years later, during a rare but tense period of calm before his invasion of Russia in 1812. Nor did he slap her in the face in the widely witnessed divorce proceedings, where she recognized the necessity of divorce so that Napoleon could secure his regime by producing an heir. More poignantly than in the film, the historic Joséphine died the day before Napoleon arrived in his first exile, on Elba, and not after his return from that exile; moreover, he was fully aware of her illness and death in close-to-real time and suffered a horrible combination of guilt, regret, and powerlessness that an insightful filmmaker might have drawn out rather than trivialize.
Other episodes also betray the true history in ways that are either obvious or easily detectable. Napoleon was not present at the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, which opens the film in a scene that defies all available descriptions of the actual event. He never met the Duke of Wellington, his great adversary at Waterloo (played in the film by a thoroughly unconvincing Rupert Everett), either just before being sent to distant St. Helena or at any other time. Both men knew exactly where that remote island is, however, while the film for some reason shows them unsure of its location. The streamed version due for near-future release is said to be an hour longer, and the director’s cut an hour longer than that, so who knows how many more errors may be written into the film?
Scott is entitled to his opinion of historians—and from reports those hired onto the film as consultants were not much listened to—but his film would have turned out much better if he had followed the real events rather than let his uninformed and pedestrian imagination wander. In what was probably an inadvertent moment of accuracy, however, he did grasp the ideology underpinning the Terror, which inflicted mass death at the height of French Revolution’s most radical phase. Scott’s Robespierre, who has a scene before his own bloody overthrow, pronounces the historical Robespierre’s open admission in a speech of February 5, 1794, that “Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice; it is, then, an emanation of virtue.” The line is as authentic as it is frightening, but the sentiment behind it so glaringly contradicts favorable interpretations of the French Revolution that is often simply omitted from historical studies.
Defenders of the film may point to its vast battle scenes to redeem it, but those scenes also veer toward the simplistic. For all their massive scale, we see little of how Napoleon’s military mind functioned, beyond an obvious preference for occupying defendable high ground. At Austerlitz, one of the few battles that the film depicts in detail, however, Napoleon actually abandoned the local high ground—the famous Pratzen Heights—to lure the combined Austrian and Russian armies into a trap and then drove them from it in a vigorous assault whose success owed much to chance reinforcements arriving through a cold winter march. The film also dwells on collapsing ice playing a role in the Allied defeat, even though this was a minor detail whose significance has been doubted almost since the time of the battle.
Phoenix’s portrayal avoids the ham acting that Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Armand Assante, and Ian Holm, among others, have brought to Napoleon, but his essay is reduced to a grumpy mug that allows for neither growth nor development. The heroic Napoleon we meet at the siege of Toulon, at age 24, is indistinguishable from the worn-out 51 year-old who ends his days on St. Helena. Phoenix, who is 49, is far closer to the latter. We receive no sense of the character’s motivation, no hint of his origins, and no consideration of anything he did between battling a ceaseless stream of cardboard enemies and trying to conceive an heir in brief scenes of obviously unsatisfying sex. Napoleon’s admirers—a misguided lot who go along with his image as the “Enlightenment on Horseback”—will caterwaul about the film’s omission of civil law, education reform, and the like, but his detractors can equally complain that we get little sense of him as a military dictator who ruled through a police state and empty neo-Roman ceremonial.
It was perhaps inevitable that Scott should be drawn into controversy as a British director portraying a French subject, particularly after an interview in which he compared Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin. Le Figaro, the leading French daily, dismissed the film as “Ken and Barbie under the Empire,” while other French critics have harped on its historical inaccuracies as a sign of incomprehension if not deliberate disrespect. Their arguments would carry more water if France’s film industry could produce a worthy biopic to challenge Scott’s, but the country’s creators are with rare exception averse to grand narratives that either glorify or indict their nation’s history. For a film released in the United States on the day before Thanksgiving, one need not enter that debate to see Scott’s film for what it is: a real turkey.
