He's Just Like Me

I admit, I've had this in the drafts for way too long. I saw the movie twice, wrote two thousand words, and then got busy with Christmas. However, as much as time is a human construct and New Years is more of an artificial time for renewal than anything else, I refuse to have this unfinished and following me into 2024.

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This is a defense of Napoleon. Not Napoleon Bonaparte, the man—I wouldn’t even know where to start with that—but the movie. I wish I could’ve watched the 1927 silent Napoléon before watching this. That film was made by a Frenchman and is five and a half hours long, which at this point in my life is prohibitively so, even setting aside the fact that I don’t know how I would get my hands on a copy anyway.

I’ve read a little bit about Ridley Scott’s inspiration for the film—apparently he draws heavily on an aesthetic love of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and his own feature debut The Duellists (1977), both of which I have also not seen. What I do know about the former, at least, is that it was famously filmed with a good deal of natural lighting intermingled with artificial lighting to create a remarkably realistic period setting (and I have seen stills from the film). It’s a common misconception that Barry Lyndon used all natural lighting, but really is just excellent moviemaking. Kubrick was supposed to make a Napoleon movie, which obviously never happened. It was supposed to be, as I believe he said himself, the greatest movie ever made. The script has a home on the internet and in the hands of Steven Spielberg, who is reported to be working on turning it into some sort of series.

His research, however, was channeled into Barry Lyndon. Released on its heels and with great influence, The Duellists is also a Napoleonic period piece. More than 45 years later, it seems that Scott is as hung up on Barry Lyndon as ever. My understanding is that most people who have seen it are, but most people don’t get a $200 million budget to explore their fascination. 

Napoleon is a towering figure whose life necessitates a monstrous budget. Kubrick couldn’t get the cash to make his movie. $200 million is a pretty good start, but it’s not exactly earth shattering or record-breaking for a blockbuster budget nowadays. I’m not sure how much of it came from Scott’s coffers; it was produced in tandem by Apple Studios and Scott Free Productions (the Scott brothers’ company), though I’m not sure what the split was. However, unlike other blockbusters with a comparable budget, Napoleon actually looks the part because Ridley Scott has always been someone who gives a shit (please see: any Alien movie he’s been involved with). It’s a beautiful movie for the most part; I have few complaints. Among them I count the fact that the dreary and snowy Battle of Austerlitz takes on that grayed-out fuzzy look that plagues so much of computer-heavy special effects. The CGI blood splatter from Robespierre’s suicide attempt was there and gone again in the blink of an eye but remains singularly, jarringly bad (pretty common in new movies). Those are all common and forgivable sins. The rest of the costumes, sets, and effects, however, are all exemplary. Please note I am not any sort of expert in historic art, fashion, and architecture, so anything not obviously anachronistic goes unnoticed by me. If you are able to tell that a dress has a more 1780s shape than a 1790s shape, good for you, but it’s not a documentary. 

Where the film unerringly succeeds in visuals is where it takes its inspiration from Barry Lyndon. Scott scatters low, candlelit scenes throughout his allotted two and a half hour runtime, with his ornately decorated, skillfully chosen sets populated by opulent post-Revolution high society. The first time that Napoleon comes across Josephine, a meeting at the center of the entire film, they are viewing a debauched comedic play about the execution of Marie Antoinette. The lighting is low, but they still catch each other's eye. Their expressions are similar, more stoic than those that surround them who are laughing heartily. I assume Josephine is wary of the depiction of misogynistic and cruel treatment because of her own experiences during the Revolution, whereas Napoleon probably thinks such gross humor to be below him. In that moment, Josephine is shadowing Paul Barras but, being a widow, is presumably looking for a man to cement her position in a gradually stabilizing but still shaky society. 

In the next scene, Napoleon is wandering throughout the party, unfazed by what he seems to think is banal and base happenings around him. There’s a lot hidden in the shadows here, especially if you’re only focused on Napoleon and what he thinks (I missed the nudity on my first viewing!). He ends up staring at Josephine, who confronts him about it. I really can’t get over how Vanessa Kirby’s eyes shine in the candlelight. I found her character hard to read, and I really didn’t come away from my first viewing fully understanding what I was supposed to make of her inner world. Not that her performance was bad—I thought the opposite. It’s just that this Josephine was complex and interesting; Scott’s Napoleon joins the ranks of several other “wife” movies released this year. She’s really the most important character in the film, and God knows that Napoleon Bonaparte would have agreed. 

As with budget limitations, time constraints also burden any filmmaking looking to tackle the first French emperor. As I said, that silent Napoléon from a hundred years ago is five and half hours. I’m not sure where it begins and ends, but I feel pretty good guessing that it doesn’t pickup in 1793. It scarcely covers his rise through the ranks and his relationship with Paul Barras—that sort of thing is not what this movie takes its precious time to meditate on. Again, it really is a wife movie. 

The film’s second greatest strength is its editing. It’s what saves the audience from feeling its slightly-longer-than-standard runtime, and also how it manages to cover so much time and a multitude of significant events. There isn’t any empty air in this movie, every word and scene is important. Early in the film, Napoleon refers to “Mother” offhandedly to a character who is somewhat important later in the film, and that is from what you must glean is his brother, Lucien. Josephine’s children and any character only good for a few lines falls away. Where you may expect a lot of battle scenes in a movie about one of history’s greatest military leaders, you are really only treated to Toulon, Austerlitz, and Waterloo. It works and avoids any risk of repetition; the fighting is distinct and significant to the plot.

This movie is not a biopic, period. There’s no Corsica, military boarding school, or any of that childhood dullness that weighs down other movies with biographical slants. Why then, start at the Siege of Toulon? Of course, it’s an early successful strategic battle. Scott also gets to flex some of his set pieces, introduce the old Anglo-Franco angst just in case the audience was unfamiliar with, uh, history, and kill a horse in a way I’ve never seen in a movie before. The horse gets hit by a cannonball directly in the chest, sending blood and guts splattering and Napoleon to the ground. I can’t find a source or an exact number, but Napoleon apparently had something like 20 horses killed underneath him over the course of his military career. That’s pretty metal. Toulon is also the only part of the movie where Napoleon takes on a more physical involvement in battle—after his fall from his horse he joins his men going over the walls. Scott doesn’t show him as a fearsome warrior or anything—he holds his own, that’s basically it, and it’s fine. What Scott does add is labored, scared breathing at a heightened volume as he scales the wall and takes on the British. Napoleon is exhilarated, scared, and human, but he pulls it off according to plan.

In fact, the film is littered with constant reminders of his humanity. For every win, he is humiliated in some way. He comes face to face with a mummified pharaoh (sorry, don’t know who it’s supposed to be), and there’s a dramatic build that falls flat as he interacts awkwardly with it. It’s also the only scene that really nods to the myth that Napoleon was short, and that’s certainly not a coincidence. There’s just this physicality added to the character of Napoleon in a lot of the scenes, aside from his often abrasive and unbecoming words. He bumbles around and literally throws himself to safety during the coup, relying on his brother’s wit to actually achieve political success. Indeed, Scott takes one of the most recognizable moments in history—Jacques-Louis David aptly situated off to the side—and makes the coronation of France’s first emperor equal parts epic and bumbling. Napoleon seizes the crown and goes to place it on his own head, an egotistical usurping of the pope immortalized in oil measuring 20 by 30 feet, but he goes to place it upon his head and finds that there isn’t a next. His swift, certain movement gives way to a tremble and an awkward handing off of his crown. I think it’s brilliant. Scott embraces myth and undermines it in the same moment.

Josephine, according to his character, is at the heart of all of his confidence. He keeps trying to assure everyone and everything that his ambition is in accordance with destiny and God’s will, but his love for Josephine is where he falters. He really was sprung for her, both in the film and real life. She exists to subvert his ambition and ego in every way, even as he speaks. When he returns from the campaign in Egypt because he’s being cuckolded, he continuously asserts that he is not like the average man and isn’t victim to the same insecurities. Obviously, coming all the way from Egypt, he is. 

After his confrontation about her affair, Josephine turns him on his head and gets him fully under her thumb. You are nothing without me, she tells him, and he meekly repeats it. He seems to believe it, truly. Napoleon talks a big game about destiny, and I’m sure he sees his marriage to Josephine as part of that, but he relies on her to undergird his confidence. I’ve read a little bit of his diary—he seemed to actually think that at times, that her love made him a better man militarily. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. He has that deeply held belief that she makes him great, he also repeatedly makes a total fool of himself in front of her.

The first scene when they level with each other, when the pretense of society has been dropped and it is just them alone in a room, Josephine confesses to a myriad of transgressions during her imprisonment. I think that would be a bold move for a woman of her station and position—widowed and recently out of jail in a precarious social perch—and I think it’s less interesting that Napoleon doesn’t care than the fact that she even offered the admission. She didn’t have to make it to entice him into a relationship in marriage, he seemed to be heading that way regardless. To me, it’s the greatest indicator that we are meant to understand that she really does care for him on some level.

Now, we get to tackle the why. Why I was so excited for this movie, why I feel the need to defend it, and why I gave this post a meme title. First and foremost, a quote from his diaries:

“Always alone in the midst of men, I go back home that I may give myself up to my lonely dreams and to the waves of my melancholy. Whither will my thoughts tend tonight? Towards death....How far removed human beings are from nature! How base they are and contemptible!...Life has become a burden to me, because the men I live with and probably am doomed to live with in the future are as different from me as moonlight differs from sunshine.”

These words made it into the Napoleon powerpoint presented in my AP Euro class my senior year of high school, and I haven’t stopped thinking about them since. The revelation that one of history’s most iconic figures was an emo teenager… there is no greater he’s just like me. 

It’s also laughable and silly, just like you (royal “you”) were when you were a teenybopper and you thought you were soooo different. But Napoleon thought that, both in real life and in Scott’s adaptation. Napoleon presents a flawed but great man… yawn. Isn’t that what every other movie is about? What distinguishes it from other films I have seen this year or other historical epics generally? Scale and aptitude from Scott, yes, but also the embrace of the inadvertent awkwardness that comes with ambition. You can laugh at his emo contemplation of suicide and how laughably distant he thought himself from his peers at Auxonne. In Scott’s movie, you do laugh at him barking at his wife, his juvenile anger at the British (“You think you're so great because you have boats!” is one of the year’s most memorable line deliveries), and a variety of other scattered moments. He was the first emperor of France and changed Europe forever. He also tried to invade Russia in the winter. Those are the pitfalls of greatness—the destiny and the idiocy. Napoleon captures the man, the tone, and the wife.