Post by Dracula on Dec 3, 2023 20:25:53 GMT -5
Napoleon(11/26/2023)
Without the full marriage aspect here the film just kind of feels like it doesn’t have much in the way of an interesting take on this figure at all, and it comes off as rather shallow. In the year of Oppenheimer I guess I’ve come to expect a bit more from my epic life stories. That having been said, for all the film’s failings as a biopic it does have a lot going for it as a war movie. What can I say, Ridley Scott has long proven himself to be a master at shooting historical epic battle scenes in modern way and he hasn’t lost that skill at all. His take on Austerlitz and Waterloo are both just banger action scenes and the film doesn’t exactly skimp on the production values elsewhere. Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby also do some good work here depending on one’s tolerance for the film’s takes on the characters and there are other good cast members here, though a lot of them don’t really get the screen time to stand out as much as they maybe could. I’m enough of a simp for this genre that this movie still pretty much worked for me in spite of itself and I enjoyed my time watching it. However, unless that director’s cut dramatically improves things I can’t say this was a project I had a lot of respect for. Instead I probably liked it the way that I tend to like dumb action movies the like for their genre thrills more than for any real substance because there’s not a lot of that here.
*** out of Five
There is perhaps no filmmaker alive today who has as many “director’s cuts” and “extended editions” as Ridley Scott. Hell, there are more different cuts of his 1982 film Blade Runner than most directors create in their entire careers. That particular film is one whose reputation was radically adjusted once people were able to finally see Scott’s intended version rather than the theatrical version with its weird lifeless voiceover. Another Ridley Scott director’s cut that proved revelatory was his 194 minute version of the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, which turned what had once seemed like an underwhelming “epic” into something with some real heft. The same can’t be said for all of Scott’s alternate cuts. Look in the DVD boxes of such Scott releases as Alien, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, Robin Hood, and The Martian, which are seldom commented on likely aren’t actually his preferred versions and mostly seem to exist as marketing gimmicks for their respective releases. On one level it’s great that modern release patterns have allowed Scott to experiment this much with different cuts but it also takes a bit of a toll, mainly because you become weary that when you buy an expensive ticket for one of his movies you’re never quite sure if you’re getting the “real” version or a truncated edit that won’t have its full richness until subsequent releases. Such is the quandary when looking at his latest film Napoleon, which is playing in theaters across the country at a runtime of 157 minutes although it’s already been announced that when it comes to the Apple+ streaming service later it will be as an alternate cut which exceeds four hours. That may well be the better version and when watching it in its current form you can’t help but have that clouding your take on the version currently on sale.
The film begins in 1793 with Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) as an ambitious young officer in the wake of the French Revolution who makes a name for himself at the Siege of Toulon. From there we follow Bonaparte through his meteoric rise to prominence through the ending of the reign of terror and the suppression of the royalist insurrection. Once he’s finally a major general we start following his courtship of Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), the widow of an aristocrat who was guillotined during the revolution. The two fall for each other and marry relatively early in Bonaparte’s rise but their relationship becomes complicated fairly early with affairs on both ends and no children sired, which becomes more of a problem for Bonaparte as he increasingly becomes a powerful figure in France. From there we start going through the highlights and lowlights of Bonaparte’s career: his victory at Austerlitz, his ill-fated invasion of Russia, exile, return from exile, Waterloo, return to exile. All the hits are there but this time rendered with modern production values.
Napoleon Bonaparte lived a life that has long confounded the feature film as a format. Abel Gance’s 1927 film about the general’s life, still probably the best regarded film on the subject, ran something like five and a half hours and still only covered the first ten years of his life and never even got to his Egyptian campaign. Hell, there are entire feature length films that center around individual battles the guy fought, so fitting an entire birth to death biopic with all the major battles in it into even a 157 minute frame is probably folly. Given that it’s perhaps impressive that David Scarpa’s screenplay was able to cover all this material with any kind of flow at all but it doesn’t do it without some awkwardness. The film in some ways suggests that it will be trying to structure the movie around Napoleon’s marriage to Joséphine and use that relationship as a key motivating factor in many of his actions but does so rather unconvincingly. The scenes with her, which emphasize the general’s oafish side, are amusing and interesting but also never feel as central to the movie as they’re supposed to. I suspect this side of the movie was the most heavily cut down for this theatrical version in favor of the more visually spectacular battle scenes and that leaves the whole sub-plot feeling too small a part to really carry the movie but too big a part of it to just feel like the kind of side element that wives usually are in biopics of great men.
*** out of Five