“You don’t reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.”—Napoleon
So I’d better watch out.
Alas, Boney didn’t say that in the movie. He was a witty man—“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”—but in Ridley Scott's film he doesn’t say much that's amusing. He suffers. Bonaparte was not a sufferer.
In the forefront are the battle scenes, which I think is why the reviews are so tepid. Battle scenes bore women. But men, even at my age, take a you-never-know attitude and watch anxiously.
The champion of such scenes, seldom even approached, is in The Birth of a Nation. No CGI there. (Don’t try to show that to your students today.) Then comes Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, which Scott seems to have glanced at for his Austerltz sequence. And most of us know the opening of Saving Private Ryan, after which the movie dies and stumbles around like a zombie. (Of course I’m skipping a wealth of expertly made such scenes.)
Nabokov remarked that in reading a novel one should identify, not with a character, but with the author. Same for movies. Those back views of Napoleon and/or his generals watching the action suggest Scott himself. You have to be a general to manage that many people. Kubrick, as was typical of him, did it smoothly.
Jean Gabin appeared in no film without a train, it was in his contract. Dustin Hoffman until quite late made no movie in which he didn't run—or no deal. In The Master, Inherent Vice, Irrational Man and Joker (two hours of humorless punishing abrasion), Joaquin Phoenix plays a man upon whose intellect we look down, and he may never do otherwise. This is the stuff of comedy, but he doesn't make comedies. His appearance in the Woody Allen film is enough to turn it melodramatic. And now we have his Napoleon.
Josephine was an embarrassment for Boney (I assume their correspondence is being quoted, or at least guiding the film, as Mozart’s did Amadeus); but he had mistresses to console him—ten, twenty-two, the count varies. Life goes on.
The actress does not look unlike Josephine, except for her (Josephine’s) black teeth, which might explain why the film’s Napoleon takes her from behind, pumping away convulsively—so unsensuous, so unFrench, so ungorgeous. (See Gorgeousness.)
The food-and-drink scenes are too many to count. If you want to express disdain for someone, as several of these characters do, speak to him while eating; or as Josephine does, while drinking. She seems to be a tippler, perhaps to soften her distaste. Indeed, it’s a role only an Englishwoman could play.
This is the administrative genius who inspired, guided and set in place the Napoleonic Code of law, which influenced the entire world, and is still in force in France, a hundred and twenty other countries, Quebec, and Louisiana.
“I love power,” he said. “But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.”
“Music,” he said, “is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.” He’s said to have been a vulgarian but he sounds like a refined one.
He was an engineer. Here’s Emerson, perhaps closer to the subject: “‘There shall be no Alps,’ he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France.”
He was under no illusions about the First Republic: “Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.”
He was a shrewd politician: “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
Of the horrible stories that surround him Emerson says, “He must not therefore be set own as cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel—but woe to that thing or person who stood in his way!”
According to Valéry, also closer to the subject, he was a man of letters: “Napoleon, Caesar, Frederick the Great: men of letters eminently gifted for manipulating men and things—with words….Napoleon was a victim of his mental gifts, whose power outran his own and wound up by destroying it.”
Indeed, he regrets that Napoleon wasted his mind: “It's sad to see a great brain like Napoleon's devoting itself to such petty things as empires, events, the roar of cannon, and the clamors of the mob; believing in history, in glory, in posterity, in ‘Caesar’; concerning itself with the shifting masses and surfaces of nations. Could he not feel that what really matters is something quite different?”
As if anticipating such objections Boney said, “The French complain of everything, and always.”
Of course no man can be understood, even oneself, but please, he was not a fool. What is it about him that even French cinema reduces him to a cartoon? In this reluctance to give him his due I smell a symptom of wokeness.
Let us turn, then, to the messages, because, though it straddles them awkwardly, this film is not above messages:
1) That it continually presents us with dates suggests that it thinks of itself as a history lesson. Indeed, the colors are so faint that I remember it, inaccurately, in documentary black and white, so that the bursts of color—the coronation, the underwater shots in the Austerlitz campaign—stand out as garish.
2) The mortality statistics at the end give it an anti-war feel, for which I have small patience. As Boney said, “Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than we generals.”
3) Josephine’s refusal to take him seriously is a nod at feminism, very nice.
4) But its real message, muted almost to imperceptibility, is that when you indulge in political correctness as the citizens of the Republic did, and as we aging love-and-peace-niks do, when you “imagine all the people living for today” (impossible—no one lives in the present), when you lie spreadeagled in the grass revelling in Rousseau’s dream that humanity is “good” (see The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France), a strong man appears and jumps on you with both feet.
“The strong man,” said Boney, “is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.”
The French were lucky in their strong man. It doesn’t always turn out that way.
Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
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