In the Flesh: Napoleon

Isn’t it nice to have a peanut butter sandwich? I don’t mean some horrible gas station contrivance of damp bread and flavorless, dried-out peanut butter. I mean freshly stirred Teddy, salty and rich, with bright raspberry jelly to cut through the nutty flavor and gorgeous whole wheat bread, springy and firm. Napoleon is just such a sandwich. It isn’t reinventing anything, isn’t shattering any paradigms or breaking any new ground for film as an art form, but what it does, it does well. Gripping battles, subtle and engaging relationships, delightful costuming, a surprisingly playful and whimsical score full of accordions, Baroque classics, and even snippets of the fucking 2005 Pride and Prejudice soundtrack. It’s well-paced, it’s funny, it’s kind of dumb, Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby are great at the head of a rogue’s gallery of character actors like Ian McNeice, Rupert Everett, Sinéad Cusack, and Abubakar Salim, there’s a color story — in short, it’s good work.

A surprising little treat: there’s some serious gore! In the first big action set piece, Napoleon’s horse catches a cannonball to the breastbone that turns its flesh into hamburger. Lots of shattered bones and severed limbs and banners of blood ribboning through frozen water in horrid little white-red-blue French flag patterns. It’s bracing stuff. Lots of little visual details about early modern firearms and artillery. The repeated motif of Napoleon covering his ears to protect them from the sound of the cannons quickly communicates his lack of awareness as to the suffering his talents cause; not the most creative character tic, but it does the job, and the emperor’s odd duck willful ignorance is a strong choice for a defining character trait. Watching him clamber up onto a box (it’s remarkable how small Phoenix manages to make himself seem) to lend a mummified corpse his ear is an eerie moment not just because of the horror film trappings, but because there’s no sense Napoleon has any idea that in terms of dramatic irony he’s pitching destiny a slow ball right down the middle of the plate.

Scott’s battles are great as usual, frenetic and bloody and fully realized, but it’s the way this almost childish thirst for conquest and mastery extends into and beyond the personal that really distinguishes the film. Napoleon’s schoolboy cruelty and randy silliness with Josephine, who bears the burden of his affections with a disinterested impatience readily perceptible to everyone but the emperor himself, place his imperial ambitions in the context of personal grievance. It’s hardly novel to state that personal grievances between crowned heads are a terrible reason for thousands or even millions to die screaming, but Napoleon boils the point down until it’s hard as rock and then fires it at you out of a cannon. After his defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett, perfectly cast), the conqueror directs his ambitions at lower-hanging fruit than true love or world domination. He captivates a group of young midshipmen aboard Wellington’s Bellerophon, writes imaginary letters to himself from a devoted and adoring Josephine, and finally interrupts a pair of little girls playing at sword-fighting to claim credit for the Russians burning Moscow to the ground. Then he dies, lord of a lonely little rock in the middle of the ocean, master of his own feeble imagination. To quote another, more recent demagogue: Sad!