Hollywood’s Ultra Hack returns to hackneyed European history.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is another of his lavishly produced movie epics with a TV-commercial mindset. As usual, Scott sells visually sumptuous cynicism, this time about Napoleon Bonaparte leveraging his control of post-Revolution France, starting in 1793, to attempt conquering the world. But Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa (All the Money in the World) display a tawdry sense of Western history that is unfortunately in sync with the times. It’s a commercial selling despotism.
As Joaquin Phoenix portrays him, Napoleon is idiosyncratic, pervy, brutish — Joker in a bicorne hat. Phoenix’s caricature reflects today’s popular disdain for colonialist Europe, embodying our broken sense of heroism — now the result of living through deceitful leadership. Napoleon’s bravado and military cunning are juxtaposed with personal quirks seen in his marital competition with Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Their lurid contest of wills is worthy of both TMZ and The Crown. Josephine hikes up her dress, spreads her legs, and taunts, “Once you see it, you will always want it.” It’s a metaphor for dictatorial obsession.
European History 101 highlights flash by: Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, the siege at Toulon, the excursion into Egypt, the battle of Austerlitz, plus sub-Tolstoy War and Peace nuggets. Each incident is an art director’s triumph rather than historical revelation. Scott himself is a commander of extravagant imagery that is often visually striking. Back when Blade Runner came out, some reviewers mistook its futuristic, sci-fi opulence for Josef von Sternberg’s sensual expressiveness. But since then, Scott has plied his undeniable talent impersonally.
Scott is Ultra Hack because he reduces the moral complexity of his stories to the same easy consumption we get from a TV advert. But Napoleon is protracted, as if running time and rambling narrative incidents (the back-and-forth from battlefield to Josephine) amounted to substance. Napoleon parades an empty spectacle for a market uninterested in learning from history. And Ultra Hack’s indifference encourages that disinterest. He stages Napoleon’s legendary boast so that Phoenix lisps “I found the crown of France in the gutter and placed it atop my own head” to convey the same deadly egotism as the swaggering, drug-dealing protagonist of American Gangster. But then his battle of Austerlitz is an eyeful. In this large-scale set piece, the French army fires cannons at Russian soldiers on a field of ice, and the explosions plunge them into the water. Not a sustained feat of cinematic vision, as is Eisenstein’s battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky; it’s just splashy.
Comparison to Eisenstein is a compliment, yet there really is no comparison. Scott’s Napoleon represents a culture of visual frivolity, the depreciation of aesthetics that is a consequence of TV’s overload and digital technology’s unreality. (Too much fantastic video-game-style imagining.)
History means nothing when its facsimile can be summoned up by Hollywood’s keyboard warriors. Not even Scott, an unemotional aesthete, can pretend that he cares about history. (Exodus: Gods and Kings was dazzling yet meaningless, and the Oscar-winning Gladiator was overrated for the beefcake-peplum genre.) Ultra Hack’s brother, the late Tony Scott, was so committed to genre junk that he frequently achieved effective narratives (Unstoppable, Domino). But Ridley is less successful with his own phase of lurid melodramatic trash such as The Counselor, House of Gucci, All the Money in the World. These spectacles of bad behavior misrepresent our anxieties about power, immorality, and national destiny. Abel Gance visualized those concerns in his 1927 three-screen silent film Napoleon, a movie so magnificent that its vision makes grown men cry. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is just a Breaking Bad costume drama.
