Is this a joke, Ridley Scott?
Wherein the Joker is mommy-dommed by a mid thot
I struggled for a long time in figuring out what “angle” to take with this review. Going in, the only things I had heard were “it’s shot in grey and they got Austerlitz wrong”, and something about “toxic masculinity”. Okay, I can deal with this, I thought, naively. It’s not my first rodeo, it’s good for a laugh at least. Stupid!
Nothing could prepare me for “Napoleon”, possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. Actually, all in - the worst movie I have ever seen. The kind of movie so bad that pinning down the mere order of severity of the crimes against humanity requires repeated exposure, which in turn magnifies the horror. Do I have PTSD? Do I get workers’ comp for this?
Are people seriously complaining about the color palette? Do they also have critiques of the wallpaper at Auschwitz? It’s true the problems here are recursive, wheels inside of wheels, like a cuckoo clock made of coiled excrement, but they do have a start and an end point, and the near-greyscale color grading is near the back.
The reason it’s grey is because Ridley Scott thinks it’s really cool when a cannon ball or a bullet goes whizzzz-plork through some poor conscript or horse’s chest, and bright red blood shows up better against icy grey than a more accurate, bold color scheme. You need this high contrast when you are one million years old and have cataracts and still want to see the arterial spray. Still, this is not a crime - blood-on-grey is used in a bunch of fine movies.
But if those battle scenes exist because you are theoretically telling the story of a great general, and really like the whizzzz-plork stuff, then I have no idea why the spine of the movie is Josephine. It is possible David Scarpa, the screenwriter, is responsible. We need a Nuremberg style show trial to get to the bottom of this. But properly speaking, if we were to have truth in advertising, the title should be Napoleon and Josephine. We discover this after a twenty minute prologue establishing that Napoleon exists and is a general in revolutionary France - not a great general, mind you, because we actually do not get any indication that he is anything more than merely competent. He goes to a dinner party and the movie takes a hard turn towards the bizarre.
Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is just Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. He speaks in a monotone or shouts in frustration or cries like a little boy. He can’t make eye contact. He silently stares. He exudes no charm or charisma whatsoever. How does this man exert so much personal magnetism that even after what should have been his final defeat, his mere re-arrival during the Hundred Days was sufficient to immediately cause the French army to rally to him? We never find out. He has exactly one character element - he is inexplicably in love with Josephine.
I say “inexplicably” because Josephine lacks any objectively attractive qualities (although Vanessa Kirby does a great job with what she’s given). Widowed mother of two children who admits she banged the entire jail staff when she was imprisoned during the Terror to avoid being executed like her husband - okay, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and our mores have advanced since the eighteenth century. But she is on top of that, and let me directly quote the movie here, “a slut” (you need to say this in Jokermode at an important political meeting, in between soft monotones).
You know, Napoleon might have seen this coming when Josephine literally spreads her legs and tells him “if you look down you’ll see a surprise”. This is something a skilled poker player would refer to as a “tell”. Perhaps also when he sees her flirting with another man, whom she later bangs, at their wedding dinner. But canonically, he is deeply in love with her nonetheless, despite being furious at her known infidelities.
And this isn’t just some kind of beard relationship where he needs a wife for political purposes and it’s the publicity that offends him (although it doesn’t help that on multiple occasions he learns from a newspaper that he has been cuckolded). He actually needs her, specifically, to love him exclusively, for some reason.
The rule of thumb is that in any given Napoleon / Josephine scene, you hypothesize the worst 4chan greentext copypasta you can imagine, and lo, it appears on screen. Napoleon is on the cusp of bursting out into the “mommy milky” verse at any given moment, and I give 50/50 odds it exists in the director’s cut. Joaquin and Vanessa Kirby may have freestyled the middle third of the movie, because can you really imagine greenlighting a script that reads:
[NAPOLEON enters]
NAPOLEON: “mmmm num num num num”
[NAPOLEON awkwardly stomps foot]
[SERVANTS leave room]
[NAPOLEON violently humps JOSEPHINE with their fourteen collective layers of clothes on]
I guess the idea here is we’re “showing not telling” how in love Napoleon is (the reverse being far from clear), but combined with a twisted dual monologue where he makes Josephine apologize for her infidelities, after which she turns the tables and makes Napoleon affirm “you are nothing without me… without me and your mother”, we are not showing “deeply in love”, we are showing “deeply troubled”. The aforementioned humiliation visibly distresses and yet arouses Napoleon. What the hell, Ridley Scott.
Let me say that I am in the abstract fine with psychosexual drama like this. If you set this same movie in a contemporary fictional context, presumably you could interpret as a pseudo Strangelovian statement about how our leaders are the worst of men, how their sexual proclivities are used for corruption rather than for ensuring their literal and metaphorical posterity, how their personal foibles end up not just being quirks but actually make them unfit to rule.
But Napoleon, I am told, actually existed. He had certain core qualities you can’t really avoid, like he is really extremely good at warfare. We get “battle scenes”, such as they are (whizzzz-splork), but there’s no indication that he held Europe in terror for nearly twenty years, and only was stopped when his former Top Guy explained, look, you basically can’t beat him, the best you can hope for is to attrit his lieutenants and supplies until he’s whittled down enough to be smashed by sheer mass. We get intermittent set pieces where he mumbles through plot points, eg, “the Joker threatens the French Directorate”, or “the Joker goes Jokermode on rioters and gives them a whiff of grapeshot”. How did he win? Was it incredible that he would win, under such circumstances? Why does any educated man still know what “18 Brumaire” refers to? Why are we still making movies about him? Ridley Scott’s answer is that it just kinda happened, and ultimately he did it all for the nookie.
(Tangent: the reason you can’t just put together, like, a million guys and smash Napoleon to begin with is that you physically cannot feed or even really assemble that many men given the logistics networks available at the time. Napoleon was excellent at maneuver and logistics, not just “battles”, which is why he was so scary to fight when news and orders only travel as fast as a horse, you have to send an army on foot to chase him, that army can’t be appreciably bigger than what he has available because they would be starving before they get there, and if it’s the same size and he chooses to engage he’s probably going to win.)
You don’t need a blow-by-blow of his military career or the geopolitics or what have you, a “personal” movie is fine (in a parallel universe where Ridley Scott was still a good director, he made a Napoleon / Bernadotte movie - talk about twists of interpersonal drama). But without at least some of these core elements to link to the actual character you don’t actually have a movie “about Napoleon” with an actual narrative, just a collection of tasteful CGI-interpolated cannon fire and weird sex stuff. The latter drives the entire plot, from 20 minutes in, to the last moment. Napoleon escapes from Elba, in this absurd telling, because his whore ex-wife cucked him, yet again, with the Tsar of Russia. We’re putting the band back together to go get our girl! He is very sad to find, once he gets to Paris, that she died of pneumonia just before he got there. In reality he discovered that she had died before he ever left Elba, but it’s important that your sole guiding star drive all the action.
Perhaps the most grossly insulting part of the whole production is that if you were going to make a fundamentally psychosexual Napoleon / Josephine movie, you have material, and Ridley Scott misuses it or just leaves rubies floating in the muck. Napoleon was not the sadsack incel he is portrayed as - he was French! He acted like it! He banged Josephine’s lady-in-waiting in an incident that caused their most notable blowup - one could infer over resentment due to Josephine’s inability to have an heir, and her resentment of his resentment. This is more compelling stuff. There is an idea that one can be in love, but that that love takes a backseat to ambition - and this is true for both of them. There is the idea that Josephine is also exercising her ambition to be with high-status men, in a way as ultimately self-destructive as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. You could attribute her behavior to her PTSD hangover from the Terror, in the same way that Napoleon himself is, in a sense, a hangover from revolutionary ultraviolence. One could even parallel the biological deterioration - Josephine ages and is unable to bear children, and at a critical moment at Waterloo, some sources indicate the aging Napoleon physically can’t bear to sit in the saddle to survey the battle. Instead we get insipid mommy complex bullshit.
Is it just because Scott is English? Is it that banal? We are subjected to mostly fictitious scenes where Napoleon leeringly tries to solicit a 15 year old from the Tsar, or where his mother liquors him up and graphically describes how she has procured a girl “undressed and ready to receive” to prove his fertility, because the English guy wants to dab on Napoleon? How old is Ridley Scott? Did he grow up reading caricatures in the British press… circa 1808?
The whole thing is rather gross and there is no redeeming spark. I decline to elaborate on the rest of the plot, the pacing, the tonal discrepancies, the color issue, the battle scenes, or any of the other problems, because the core of the movie is rotten. If you want a Napoleonic drama, watch Waterloo. If you want to watch “Cuck husband will invade ANYWHERE for domme gf”, fuck right off to Pornhub.
