With spectacular battle scenes and plenty of accurate detail, Ridley Scott's latest film - starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French military commander - is a 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 decades, and who encountered several stormy battles along the way. It's an impressive achievement, although you might appreciate Scott's directorial skills more than Napoleon's own.
The story begins in 1789, when Marie Antoinette is being beheaded on the guillotine - during the French Revolution - as an officer played by Joaquin Phoenix gives a stern look that he will adopt for most of the film. The new leaders of the Republic fear being driven out by the Guards or the invading British, so they send this eager Corsican soldier to the city of Toulon to liberate a fortress occupied by British soldiers. As he prepares to attack, he adjusts his famous hat and thus begins his rise to greatness.
The fierce battles that follow are all spectacular, all distinct from each other, and all easy to follow. Amidst the smoke, blood, and chaos, Scotti offers the chance to see who is winning and why. As knights charge across misty fields 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, GladiatorHis Napoleon is calm - to the point of drowsiness - when on the battlefield, a sly, irascible brawler in meetings, and a tongue-tied teenager when it comes to women.
However, the film doesn't reveal why he's so in love with Joséphine, or if she's in love with him at all. Phoenix reads many of Napoleon's adoring letters, but they don't explain why he feels unworthy of her - 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/
