Napoleon review: Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix offer absurdism and spectacle in engrossing biopic

Joaquin Phoenix plays the eponymous ruler in Ridley Scott's Napoleon. (Screen grab/YouTube/Sony Pictures Entertainment)

“I’m not built like other men. And I’m not subject to petty insecurities,” Napoleon tells his wife Josephine in one of the many intimate but tense conversations the two have over the course of Ridley Scott’s mammoth epic. It’s a scene that maybe perfectly summarises this odd, at times ludicrous portrait of a famed, headstrong specimen from Europe’s collective past. Napoleon didn’t quite shape history as much as he became its most enigmatic, cheeky proponent. In this film, he is a brute on the streets, but a nervous wreck off them. He is self-aware as a contrarian, but despicably weak as a man incapable of controlling urges. We know Napoleon the impudent ruler, the battle-hardened veteran, the tyrant, the madman who led soldiers to their death. But this is Napoleon the man-child, a mama’s boy permitted to become part of history, as opposed to clutching it from the jaws of anonymity. It’s a bizarre, borderline satirical portrayal that though naughty in its affirmations is nonetheless dazzling to witness.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the eponymous ruler, an army general looking to rise through the ranks in post-revolution France. Some of the ruler’s significant accomplishments are captured in visceral detail as Napoleon rises through the ashes of the French Revolution to become the self-declared ruler of a tortured, disenchanted republic.

Stanley Kubrick famously worked in vain for years to get his Napoleon biopic greenlit. Ridley Scott, at the age of 85, went and made it in two months flat. Naturally, there is a sense of rushed excitement to the narrative here as bullet points from the man’s life play out in the midst of an unnerving emotional battle between Napoleon and possibly the only woman he ever loved – Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Scenes between Kirby and Phoenix are masterfully suspect. They play out sombrely, like a chessboard, with the creaking sounds reserved for the many ways the actors play their audiences (both in and outside the film). Letters the couple write to each other punctuate the narrative and therefore become the pipeline through which the broader history flows. A history armed by the kind of spectacle only Scott can manufacture with consummate ease. Be it a muted surrender in the deserts of Egypt, or a suicidal conquest against the snowy backdrop of Russia, the visual language conquers, even if the lack of emotional specificity cannot. Napoleon waltzes through it all with an imprecise grin and doubt plastered across his face. He is imperfect, timid and potentially immature. He flings food at people, groans when he is horny and struggles to observe etiquette befitting his stature. “It is such a shame that such a great man should have no manners,” a British adversary remarks about him.

What makes this biopic as absurd as it is remarkably intriguing, is the satirical lens Scott uses to frame his king. Phoenix adds this unreliable energy to his performance which makes it impossible to both admire and revile him. He is brave in an ambiguous way, juvenile in his carnal motivations; a frayed electric wire courting the wetness of love and the watery quality of approval. Capable of combusting or collapsing on cue. Kirby is equally magnetic, as a woman who is more than just furniture for royalty. She torments him, seduces him and, in some of the film’s most fascinating sequences, cuts him down to size. That is, until Napoleon the melancholic, ruinous emperor, replaces Napoleon the horny pervert who squeals in front of her. Again it’s not a portrayal that does the historical figure any favours.

Scott manufactures spectacles with ease and here he portrays violence in this grim, sadistic texture that rarely feels like victory. Some of the political context – including the French ruler reinstating slavery after coming to power – is sidestepped for the more visceral treats of a Scott production. It’s majestic, vast and made for the big screen. Except, for the first time ever, it is the sociological subtext of what happens between these battles, especially in the bedroom where Napoleon turns into a raging primate, that curiosities begin to take shape. There is humour, injected into the vein of a tale that has the tragicomic tonality of a battle fought for no just cause, the right to wage a phallus to the wind or violence for the sake of bluster. And that is precisely the depth or the politics that the veteran director is willing to indulge in a film that though campy and inelegant, is fascinating for its idiosyncratic instincts.

Even at his worst, Scott is a master orchestrator of the period epic. He knows how to stitch a pageant, and with Napoleon, he continues the streak of finding new depths to Phoenix’s boundless potential (which started way back with Gladiator). It’s a puzzling, at times unreliable portrayal that shirks plain history but is elevated by the slippery grammar and spirit that makes it a beguiling sampling of something caged by austerity. It’s wild, provocative, a tad silly and ultimately, riveting.