"Napoleon" by Ridley Scott: An impressive achievement

With spectacular battle scenes and plenty of accurate details, Ridley Scott's latest film – starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French military commander – is typical old-fashioned historical epic.

By: Nicholas Barber / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Martin Scorsese is 80 years old and Ridley Scott is almost 86, but neither director shows signs of fatigue. In fact, in recent years their films have become longer, more expensive and more ambitious than ever. The most recent example is Napoleons – Scott's 160-minute biopic about the French military commander and ruler who left his mark on several countries and several decades, and who during his journey encountered several stormy battles. It's a stunning achievement, although you can credit Scott's directorial skill more than Napoleon's own.

The story begins in 1789, when Marie Antoinette is beheaded on the guillotine – in the French Revolution – as an officer played by Joaquin Phoenix gives the grim look he will adopt for most of the film. The new leaders of the Republic are afraid of being driven out by the Royalists or by the invading British, so they send this brave Corsican soldier to the city of Toulon to liberate a fortress occupied by British soldiers. Just as he is ready to attack, he adjusts his famous hat and thus begins his rise to greatness.

The wild battles that follow are all spectacular, all distinct and all easy to follow. Amid the smoke, blood and mayhem, Scotti offers the chance to see who's winning and why. As knights charge across the misty plains and infantry are torn to pieces by cannons, Napoleons he points out that no other director makes films like Scotti. This clarity is also there when her hero walks through palaces and cathedrals. Voiceovers let you know who's talking and where they are, so there's a clear purpose to all the encounters with the world's politicians (played by an array of British actors and comedians who can barely contain their accents).

He sees his rival in the Duke of Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, but the most important meeting in his life is with Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby. This widowed aristocrat is in it for herself from the start, and Kirby is charismatic enough to deliver love at first sight. Determined but grounded, her eyes twinkle as she always seems to smile with the joke that only she understands. Phoenix's performance is equally pleasing. A different role from the emperor he played in Scott's earlier epic, Gladiator, his Napoleon is calm – to the point of sleepiness – on the battlefield, a lazdran in meetings and a tongue-tied teenager when it comes to women.

However, the film does not reveal why he is so in love with Joséphine, or if she is in love with him at all. Phoenix reads many of Napoleon's adoring letters, but they don't explain why she feels unworthy of him—even when he's conquered half the world and she's shared a bedroom with half his colleagues.

This ambiguity is true for other relationships as well. The film serves as a wonderful summary of Napoleon's career, as an illustrated page on Wikipedia which recounts most of the major events of his adult life. Screenwriter David Scarpa has provided plenty of delightful and sometimes very funny detail, and it's easy to be dazzled by the dozens of stately homes, hundreds of gorgeous period costumes, and countless extras that Scott presents to us. Scene by scene, his old-fashioned historical epic is very interesting. But he lacks knowledge of who Napoleon is or what he wants, where he comes from or why he represents such success. Nor does it dig beneath the surface of geopolitics. It's never clear why you're fighting a particular battle or signing a particular treaty, and because it's not clear it's hard to care about the results.

Scotti has already announced that he is getting ready for a montage of four and a half hours Napoleon, so maybe that version will fill in some of the gaps. The current version, impressive as it is, is attractive without being pretentious. It feels like a trailer for the longer and presumably richer and deeper film to come. /Telegraph/