The year 2023 was a good one for movies, the best in several years at a minimum. All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, May December, Perfect Days, The Boy and the Heron, and The Zone of Interest are
all films that are going to stay with me for a long time and will merit
re-watching. Numerous other high-profile films from last year took
notable artistic risks and deserve serious attention, from mega-hits
such as Barbie (which I discussed in the last issue) to commercial disasters such as Beau Is Afraid.
Notwithstanding
Scarpa’s declaration, however, not a few high-profile films of 2023
tackled “great man” stories, his own obviously included. Napoleon was
among the most audacious of these, daring to encompass the entire life
of one of the most significant individuals in the last thousand years of
history. It also fell the furthest short of its ambitions—but that was
not an unusual failure among last year’s films. With one crucial
exception, when filmmakers in 2023 contemplated greatness, they didn’t
merely try to temper the audience’s enthusiasm by exposing its limits or
its dark side. They left audiences fundamentally perplexed about why
the story was being told at all.
It’s probably foolish to draw too many conclusions from a single
year’s filmic output. But the casual certitude with which Scarpa made
his comment—of course one couldn’t make a movie of a great man’s story these days; everyone knows that—in the context of writing a film about Napoleon of
all people, suggested to me that there was something deeper at work
than mere coincidence. Filmmakers clearly still relish the opportunity
to tell stories on an epic scale, stories about real people, not cartoon
superheroes. Have they forgotten how to draw real characters that can
fill the frame?
In Scarpa’s interview, he notes that his and Scott’s original plan was for a smaller frame rather than a larger-than-life man.
They wanted to make a film focused on the relationship between
Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, and I could see the
residue of that concept in the finished film. When Joaquin Phoenix’s
Napoleon first sees Josephine (played by Vanessa Kirby), he’s
immediately love-struck. It’s an adolescent-feeling moment, and
Bonaparte’s love for Josephine has a consistently juvenile quality (he
even begs for sex at one point by flapping his gums in a mutely
infantile manner). But that childlike quality is not limited to the love
plot; this Napoleon seems juvenile throughout the film. I was put in
mind of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a man who had been at war since
boyhood, who fled to the battlefield to escape the emotionally
treacherous world of politics, and who was easily brought to defeat by
his mother’s tears. But Coriolanus was never loved by the people.
Napoleon was. Yet Phoenix’s Napoleon only once or twice manifests even a
hint of the charisma necessary to move a mass of men to risk their
lives for his cause. This absence is generally a disaster for the story,
but never more so than upon Bonaparte’s return from Elba, when his mere
appearance is supposed to be enough for the soldiers charged with
apprehending him to switch sides, enlist under Napoleon’s banner, and
face terrifying odds in his last stand at Waterloo.
These personal oddities are not the worst problem with the film,
though. Napoleon was a world-shaking figure, and as he cut his swathe
through history he shattered the civilization around him in ways that
are still echoing. Yet there is no sense in the film that there was
anything particularly significant about Bonaparte as an individual—as
depicted, his extraordinary rise is mostly masterminded by others, with
opportunities falling into his lap, and even his military genius seems
to consist mostly of recognizing the importance of artillery. Nor does
the film suggest anything significant about what he stood for. We don’t
learn that he established a new legal structure in Europe, or
emancipated the Jews, or prompted the first stirrings of German
nationalism, or even that his rise from Corsican commoner to the seat of
empire struck a fatal blow to the feudal belief in the natural order of
rank. If one leaves all this out, why tell his story at all?
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with telling the story of the
private life of a great man, showing how that private life more fully
explains the public narrative we presumably know better, or even just
serving as a counterpoint to the commonly accepted version. But the
private Napoleon of this film doesn’t explain the public Napoleon, not
even by means of the love story. While Josephine may say that he is
nothing without her, there’s no evidence shown on screen that this is
the case. All we see is that she is capable of getting him to believe it
because of his own immaturity. He still divorces her for reasons of
state, of course, because he needs an heir, but that is a motive rooted
in the social system that Bonaparte himself did so much to dismantle, an
irony in which the film is completely uninterested. (Read more.)