All I really knew about this Napoleon movie is something I read back in JULY about how Vanessa Kirby got Joaquin Phoenix to slap her in a heated scene when they agreed to “shock each other.” Slate’s Luke Winkie wrote back in the summer about Ridley Scott’s attempt to make Napoleon “hot,” which I really appreciate as a historical debate. That’s all I really needed to know to go and I guess if I had known a little more I probably would’ve gone to something else instead. Still not sure WHICH of the scenes where Phoenix gets slapped is THE scene.
A note on the paths that biopics can take and the ones that I’ve liked: Friend sort of set out two paths for how things could’ve gone better, saying either focus on just the love affairs and make it juicy (which I’ll call the Spencer approach), or make it about his tactical genius and path to that brilliance, which he compares to Netflix’s The Killer, directed by David Fincher, and which I’ll call the Queen’s Gambit approach. I suggested that historical period dramas are ruined for me by The Great on Hulu, which preceded all sorts of ahistorical, pulpy, sexy, absurdist shows like Bridgerton‘s Netflix adaptation.
A note on accents: it’s a shame there are no French actors, Friend drawled as the credits rolled. A two and half hour epic about France’s greatest leader as played by an American and a merry band of aging English character actors. The accents in this movie will really fuck with your head if you think about it too hard, so I just recommend you go into it with the express purpose of mocking them. Phoenix puts on no accent and still steals the show with his line, “My destiny has brought me this lambchop.” The old bishop who conducts the proceedings to crown him emperor has like maybe an Italian accent maybe? And then obviously there are a couple of guys who are playing Austrians and Russians who kind of do a German/Russian/English blend that’s fun.
The rest of the movie that isn’t Phoenix and Kirby playing out one of the best toxic relationships of the year (I see you, Priscilla) is mostly just battles with Tenet-level clarity about what the fuck is happening at any given time. I’ve seen the trailer for this movie dozens of times since it first came out and I still had almost no idea what was happening in the frozen lake scene.
Hat’s off to Vanessa Kirby for giving it her all and all the handlers for the dogs who steal the show, but who is this actually for? People of color literally standing in the background of most scenes without almost any speaking lines. Most of the women unnamed and silent. Who makes a movie about eighteen years of a guy’s life in three hours and thinks that’ll work without pushing the boundaries of conventional historical understanding? It’s so weirdly conservative in its storytelling while trying to be epic and sensitive. It’s a war movie! But a love story! But it’s actually just a puzzle where you have to figure out why the main actor wasn’t asked to calibrate his performance to anyone else’s.
