It’s been quite a good year for the period epic. The silver screen was graced with many films that were not only realized with prestige production and mainstream release, but which have been met with a vindicating fanfare which shows that history continues to earn a place at cinemas. On the heels of Oppenheimer’s existential autobiography and Killers of The Flower Moon’s poignant tale of colonial complacency & complicity came Ridley Scott’s Napoleon to close off the year. Scott’s would be a tall order: As much as it complemented prior releases and made a welcome addition to its genre, we had just been spoiled by some spectacular period dramas and knew that anything tackling the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte would have asked much of it. This was especially so for Scott, who tossed a rather ambitious hat into the ring by choosing to document Napoleon’s entire career from the French Revolution until his unceremonious exile to St. Helena, all framed through a dual narrative of political rise and the romantic drama of his marriage to Josephine.
A lot was up against it, and there was admittedly some degree of ambivalence surrounding release. It didn’t help that there was intense yet premature debate on the film’s inaccuracies dominating its lead-up, triggered in strong part by Scott’s dismissive attitude towards historians. Despite all the smoke, another prestige epic about one of history’s most significant figures could only be looked forward to. I was myself a prospective historian some time ago, but I maintain a different orientation towards historical media than I do literature. In spite of all the hubbub, I kept an open mind and awaited the chance to see Scott’s take on the Corsican Warrior-Emperor, as any good film snob and Napoleonic Age nerd worth his salt would have. Come November, we had our day.
What of it, then? A lot has been said about Napoleon since its release (unsurprising, given it’s a major release,) but what the film seemed to recall most for me were the narrative and intellectual tensions that beset the historical epic. I could just say that Napoleon was a good time—and it was; I saw it with friends and we enjoyed it even with its glaring weaknesses at times. I wouldn’t be a good film nerd if I didn’t try to read the fun out of everything I watch though, so Napoleon resurfaced in me an internal debate about a beloved genre.
It’s a point of contention for all works of historical fiction: How is factual veracity balanced alongside dramatic license? If you ask me, I say it’s authenticity over precise fact, but the truth is that it’s a subjective exercise, defined as much by the creator of the media as much as its consumer. I hate to say it, but the old lawyer adage of “it depends” (I’m as tired of it as you are) really does resonate here. If we look at how Scott elected to show Napoleon, there’s a clear throughline of Napoleon the husband/lover and Napoleon the opportunist leader. Both are good narrative points with robust historicity, the former being an especially underrepresented theme in depictions of Napoleon. It was, admittedly, an interesting selection by Scott that could make for a compelling story. At times, it did: Making out Napoleon as a somewhat pathetic figure ridden by personal folly. Capable of mastering army and empire, yet with little control over a domestic life which, as Scott posits, was the reference point that anchored his other endeavors. Even if overstated, it’s still a valid perspective founded in authentic detail. Where Scott does invent or alter facts, he does so in service of a narrative whose authenticity remains the guiding light.
While we value different things in a historical film as viewers, I’ve always been persuaded to read historical fiction through a lens of authenticity over accuracy. A historical film is not, after all, an exercise in pedantry. While misrepresentations and falsities are an exception, a historical film is in the end a dramatized retelling, one that necessitates dramatic license by virtue of real history often being too crowded with facts and figures to form a straightforward and entertaining screenplay narrative. Truth be told, if you want to learn history comprehensively and truly, you need to seek out the literature and not find the facts in the scripts of Scott, Nolan, Scorsese or otherwise. I was, thus, more willing to defer to Scott’s directorial judgement in taking liberties so long as it wasn’t pawned off in a way that was untrue to the ethics and factual scenario of the period in a harmful way. At the same time, viewers should not expect a historical film to give a totally truthful retelling, and should be willing to question what was shown through research either before or after watching. If anything, simply watching a film like Napoleon onto itself would encourage viewers to seek out history that will better educate them about the facts and times in general. So as much as I scoffed at seeing the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon meet in person, I wasn’t offended. There were times, even, where dramatic inventions made the film better. An excellent example was a scene of Napoleon meeting with Francis, Emperor of Austria, after Austerlitz: a smug Napoleon pretending to be humbled by the fight all while humiliating his counterpart with poorly hidden boastfulness, knowing he’s secured his greatest victory yet.
Napoleon is, at its strongest moments, dripping with authentic detail and fact that lends credence to its setting and depiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. At other times, though, it’s simply too incongruous with the real Napoleon to make for a convincing historical film. Scott’s narrative insertions sometimes completely fail to characterize Napoleon truthfully. He’s often weak in a way that casts doubt about how he ever acquired a cult of popularity in France and among the European liberals of the time. His being as a whirlwind of military and strategic brilliance is hard to see when the battles are reduced to rigidly linear set pieces more akin to WWI battles that end up devolving into disorganized melees with absolutely no semblance of command. Above all else, his rapid political rise through newly built revolutionary social ladders and incredibly mercenary opportunism are hard to see when the movie gives little agency to Napoleon, simply making each step up towards Emperor the outcome of others proposing that he take more power for himself.
Here is a Napoleon who at times seems contradictory, but not in an interesting character-like way. Rather, he’s a pathetic fool who does little on his own impetus and is the subject of sometimes uncharitable portrayal. While dramatic liberties can create more interesting characterizations out of historical figures, I would have been more accepting of a pathetic Napoleon that was believable. It’s one thing to make him an inept husband, and it’s yet another to have such a characterization erode the reality of an effective empire-builder.
For someone like Napoleon, whose life and times are of an especially profound and contested scale, doing justice to his person and historical impact over the course of his entire rise to power over twenty years is no easy task. Scott did fly too close to the sun in a way. I don’t want to be entirely negative; I do respect the film for what it is in the end. Napoleon isn’t all flaws. The highs are very strong. It’s simply bogged down by unconvincing moments that make for disappointing lows, the feeling that Scott could have done better. It’s also a historical movie that’s bound to get new audiences excited about period epics in general and the Napoleonic Age in particular.
The film even spurred me to revisit old media on Napoleon which I always loved: Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) strongly came back to mind. It’s a good example of a film with reasonable scope that developed an authentic Napoleon, one who is as interesting as a character as he was as an historical figure. Waterloo’s Napoleon is a humanistic one. Tired and weary, often second-guessing himself internally. Yet, also a confident force-of-nature who carries and organizes an army with such effortless finesse, like a wizard of soldier and cannon conducting stratagem with the grace of an experienced conductor. Waterloo only deals with around a year of Napoleon’s life: His abdication and first exile to Elba, followed by his return to France and the prosecution of a new military campaign in Belgium that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo. It has an impressive production whose description greatly understates its grandeur, and it balances a climatic moment in history through sensible narrative. Rod Steiger’s Napoleon is somehow more of the real man than Joaquin Phoenix’s, but not because the two figures are grossly unalike.
In the end, a film Napoleon is never actually The Napoleon. He is “Scott’s Napoleon,” or “Bondarchuk’s Napoleon.” His foundation is of historicity, but he is also a character of dramatic make. Factuality must attend and limit the contours of his depiction, but every subject of historical study—even in the high towers of scholarship—is still being subjectively retold through the eye of the narrative’s writer. A film is no different from an academic monograph: Perspective not only endows a movie’s historical depiction with a thesis of study that defines the subject’s thematic depth, but also creates the very narrative throughline of historical drama which a film requires to tell a story. But the subject cannot ever lose his foundation. That is where Scott has fallen short: He has made an entertaining film where Phoenix walks, talks and looks like Napoleon, but one with cracks to his legitimacy as an historical film character.
The real Napoleon is himself of many contradictions, and that reverberates into his continued legacy. He was key in the demise of the French Revolution in his own time, but was also the standard-bearer of its ecumenical mission across Europe. He was a liberal among forces of reaction, yet he was also something of a tyrant. This description itself is incredibly diluted and small relative to a very wide history. A film can only capture so much of that. It must contain itself. In 1927, Abel Gance released a five-and-a-half-hour silent film epic simply also titled Napoleon (1927). Even within that protracted runtime, Gance only chose to show Napoleon’s life from childhood up to the late Revolution. Even with five hours, he could not crown his Napoleon an Emperor or show the victories for which he became most famous. Maybe the lesson for Scott, in the end, is that of scale. It took Napoleon and his Revolutionary predecessors years to build and maintain an empire. I don’t see how Scott could have rebuilt that same one in just two hours and twenty minutes.