To be clear, Scott does the expected stuff well, too. Spanning from the 1789 French Revolution (lingering, with perhaps uncomfortably loving detail, on the beheading of Marie Antoinette) to the general-turned-dictator\u2019s death in 1815 (in a sequence that pays surely intentional homage to the death of Don Vito in The Godfather<\/em>), David Scarpa\u2019s screenplay keeps the expositional text and dialogue brief and to the point, and the political and military material clear and direct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are, of course, large-scale battle sequences \u2014 though not as many as you might expect, and Scott does a yeoman\u2019s job of keeping movie battle fatigue at bay. Each sequence has a distinct setting and feel, both narratively and cinematically; the first, for example, the taking of a harbor fort, is impressively outsized, but also messy and bloody. It doesn\u2019t feel \u201cstaged,\u201d but has an improvisational energy that matches what we\u2019re told, before and after, about Napoleon as a military strategist. A later battle against Russian and Austrian forces on a snow-covered battleground is aesthetically opposite, a gorgeously horrible bloodbath, brutal yet elegant, brilliantly executed by both general and director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those are the scenes we expect Scott to slay. The welcome surprise is that Napoleon<\/em> is just as compelling off the battlefield. There are some troubling signs early on; it takes a few scenes to properly orient who is what to who, and Scott has made the perhaps dubious decision to make the picture as an old-fashioned dialect soup, with his actors keeping their native accents. It spares us the possibility of Joaquin Phoenix making like Johnny Depp in Tusk<\/em>,, a pointed choice of viewer alienation over immersion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Once things take off, however, it hardly matters. Chief among his achievements, Scott has finally given moviegoers the kinky Napoleon and Josephine we\u2019ve been waiting for, and as the latter, Vanessa Kirby comes on like a brewing hurricane. A widow when they meet, she purringly warns him of her previous \u201cindiscretions,\u201d and when we take in her bored expression when he\u2019s behind her, we know more are in the offing. When he discovers she has \u201ctaken a lover,\u201d he initially laughs (\u201cYou expect me to believe my wife would do this to me?\u201d), but then it\u2019s literally in the newspapers<\/em>, so he must deal with a humiliation he was all but expecting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI am not subject to petty insecurities,\u201d he insists (uh huh) and will only take her back if she begs: \u201cYou are nothing without me,\u201d he insists. \u201cSay it.\u201d But in the very next scene, she turns the tables, and makes the same command. Their sexual mind games and power plays become a part of their relationship (\u201cCan you feel that? That\u2019s yours.\u201d \u201cThank you.\u201d), and folks, battles are battles, but this stuff is the real juice. One can complain that Napoleon<\/em> suffers from indecision of tone, and that\u2019s not invalid \u2014 the moves from giggling sex comedy to bloody war chronicle can invoke a bit of whiplash. But the contradictions of the film are arguably a meeting of medium and message; Napoleon himself was a man of contradictions (blithering idiot, but brilliant strategist), so why wouldn\u2019t his biopic be rife with them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scott traditionally gives his actors tremendous freedom, which can sometimes mean hanging them out to dry (witness Jared Leto\u2019s sub-Mario work in House of Gucci<\/em>). But the performances are all on the mark here. Kirby is quite good in a nearly impossible role \u2014 she finds the inner truth of even Josephine\u2019s wildest vacillations \u2014 and Phoenix digs into the role with relish, though (at risk of sounding like one of those fuddy-duddies who complained about Brando), a couple of seemingly good moments are marred by the difficulty of understanding his dialogue. Articulate, marble mouth!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scarpa\u2019s script has a sly sense of situational humor; he\u2019s deeply amused by the court\u2019s various anglings and machinations to produce an heir, but some of the biggest laughs are off-hand ones (watch for the scene of Napoleon nonchalantly grabbing any old sword). The biggest surprise about Napoleon<\/em> is how funny it is, though that shouldn\u2019t be; the Ben Affleck scenes in The Last Duel<\/em> were laugh riots, and the best comic material here is directly reminiscent of that. Napoleon Bonaparte is gleefully written and played as a petty little bitch, and you haven\u2019t really lived until you\u2019ve heard him wail, \u201cYOU THINK YOU\u2019RE SO GREAT BECAUSE YOU HAVE BOATS!\u201d Scott, Scarpa, and Phoenix mine all of the cringe comedy of his pettiness, his selfishness, his silliness; it\u2019s not often you see a big-budget historical biopic depict its subject as a tantrum-throwing child. Then again, such contradictions are essentially timeless. I\u2019d never do anything as 2017 as noting a character\u2019s Trumpian qualities, but as I watched Napoleon wading through his thinning, freezing troops, bellowing \u201cWE\u2019RE WINNING,\u201d well, it was hard to think of much of anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Napoleon” is in theaters Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/napoleon2-1024x576.jpg\")
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