Cover your ears!
In a singularly inspired touch, whether Scott’s, Scarpa’s or Phoenix’s, the cinema’s latest in a distinguished line of screen Napoleons has the artillery officer (that he was) repeatedly cover his ears before every salvo, whether to indicate our subject’s brute sensitivity, or else merely suggest his routine professionalism.
In a career-embracing move (surely the 85 year-old cannot have many more like this in him), Ridley Scott returns to the pictorial world of his first feature, The Duellists, while adding blood and guts to the costume epics of his youth as he did with Gladiator. Visually it is a winner: an early shot in the streets of Toulon looks as though it might hang in a Nice art gallery. Dramatically it pays lip service to the commander's famous intuition as a strategist (via Toulon and Austerlitz), before ignoring the Pyrrhic victory of Borodino completely and simplifying Waterloo to a Barry Lyndon-style face-off with some rather fancy British squares.
'Someone forgot to order any infantry.' Next to Bondarchuk's 1971 rendition, Scott's Waterloo is notably devoid of soldiery at times.
Regarding the Josephine parallel narrative, there are scenes of intimacy on a chaise longue (backed by Dario Marianelli's Pride and Prejudice) which strain after tenderness, but little else to suggest any particular warmth beyond his excessive correspondence habits; just token nods at infidelity and political expediency surrounding the production of an heir. Which is remarkable since that seems to be the guiding thread of the screenplay, rather than the wider European political arena. Phoenix plays Bonaparte as a torpid, vaguely gauche, lout who makes love like a horse, while Kirby, resplendent in a leading role at last, excites nothing but pity, triumphing in a divorce scene that mingles emotional distress with 'fou rire'.
All the critics could find to do was decry the moments of liberty taken with history (a cannon shot at the pyramids here, a Nevsky-style battle on the ice there - the single bravura sequence in the film, so who cares?). For the rest of us it is a lavish tour through the highlights of a life devoted to destruction: it sheds little fresh light on Napoleon the man but at least makes us gasp in wonder that there are still producers bold enough to take on projects such as this. And of Scott's attention to detail as a filmmaker, and lack of flair for dramatic pacing, it gives us further empirical proof.
