Despite the excellent premises, Napoleon manages to please neither fans nor cinema audiences.
What do history buffs, cinema lovers and Ugo Foscolo have in common? Certainly very little, but certainly all of them can say that they have been, at least once in their lives, betrayed and disappointed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Except that in the case of the first two categories Campo Formio and the cession of Venice have nothing to do with it, and the Napoleon in question is not the historic commander of theArmy of Italy but the one played by Joaquin Phoenix in “Napoleon” di Ridley Scott. A film that is first and foremost a great missed opportunity: the prestige of the director, the caliber of the actors, the enormous budget available represent premises that are totally disregarded by a film that hurts underneath many points of view.
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Hegel, an old acquaintance from his high school years, after the battle of Jena in 1806, refers to the French leader as “the soul of the world on horseback“. The main and most serious failure of Scott’s film lies in its failure to convey to fans, but above all to casual audiences, the grandeur of the character. A man capable in his time (as well as still today) of moving people’s souls and minds. The Napoleon depicted in the film is instead an often banal figure, devoid of emotional and sentimental charge that has always accompanied her. Both in historical and popular narrative, Bonaparte is no longer the symbol of an era of feeling and of Storm and stress as a cultural and political key. Instead it is flat, anticlimactic, pathetic. And it can’t even be the director’s desire to tell a more human Napoleon to justify this approach and the resulting result.
Napoleon’s life can be told from many points of view, but perhaps choosing the intimate-sentimental one was in itself a false start. Scott overturned the canons of Napoleonic narrative, putting the relationship between the Emperor and Josephine in the foreground, using historical events as a backdrop. The problem is that this choice represents narrative license legitimate but not appreciable: from the Italian campaign onwards, the private citizen Napoleon gave way to the military and political Napoleon and it is so obvious that the most suitable interpretation to tell his story is that of wars and treaties. If Bonaparte himself considered his loved ones and his family little more than a political instrument, why then try to impose existential reflections on him out of context?
Napoleon it is also disappointing from a technical point of view. First of all, the feeling is that the scenic and photographic potential of many settings has not been fully exploited. From Egypt to the steppes of Eastern Europe, which also could have offered excellent ideas for bolder photography. Even the editing and sequences often appear to be ends in themselves. We don’t encourage identification and we try, badly, to re-propose Napoleon’s energy and vitality without, however, grasping his deepest impetus. From an acting point of view, the performances of Phoenix e Vanessa Kirby they are among the most positive aspects of the complex. The only flaw (certainly not the fault of the Oscar winner) is that Napoleon is constantly the same, from the siege of Toulon to the last years of his reign, without aging one iota. Together with some questionable choices in the casting of certain secondary characters (Ney, for example), it compromises the public’s interest and identification with the story linked to the epic of the Napoleonic generals.
A theme on which we would like to comment is the one that has perhaps attracted the greatest number of criticisms and controversies, namely that of historical accuracy. A film is not a documentary and this appears to be highly acceptable. Except that poetic license is one thing and total invention is another. Austerliz, with the famous Sun and the presence of the three most important Emperors of the time, it is in itself one of the most “cinematic” events in History. The choice to reconstruct it in such a different way from reality is therefore inexplicable, even with a flexible approach. So one wonders why Scott opted for such a structured subject and then distorted it along the way. Austerliz is the most prominent and gross example of the historical inaccuracies peppered throughout the film. These would have been excusable I only know functional to an otherwise impeccable film. The sum adds up and excessive license becomes yet another false note in a great wasted opportunity. The writer’s hope is that the Napoleonic theme does not become a taboo in the cinematographic field for years to come. The wait is therefore for a film finally capable of paying homage to such important characters and stories in the history of the world.
2023-12-01 18:00:00
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