Corsican Lemonade
Went to see Napoleon the other night, on the grounds that history is interesting and there’s more history in the history of Napoleon Bonaparte than a lot of things. I should know better: cinema, with certain rare exceptions, is more or less orthogonal to history, though I can’t fathom why this is. The real world has a habit of fashioning every ending into a new beginning; I get that. I just don’t get why there’s such a great temptation to make up the middles.
This was the day after Thanksgiving. A melancholy day—not quite a holiday but not a day especially suitable for anything meaningful. My options were the theater or football, and if ya know me… Anyway, that must be a me problem because the theater lobby was like a mausoleum. There were maybe four other people in the theater, and the excitement was palpable, like a thin, moist tissue.
After 27 minutes1 of cringey ads and ear-shattering previews for the next billion Marvel movies, we were treated to a gory recreation of the beheading of Marie Antoinette. It was downhill from there.
I won’t say that Napoleon is without virtue. Scott’s movies are—mostly—visceral, physical affairs, and the weight of that physicality is set in hard relief by the relentless profusion of computer graphics demos that have masqueraded as film for the past twenty-odd years. The man is 85 years old and likely won’t live forever. I fear that when he goes, this sort of large-scale, quintessentially human filmmaking, which began a hundred years ago with the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, will go with him.
So a point for Mr. Scott. Beyond that, there’s a marvelous story to be told in the relationship between Napoleon and his dear Josephine; a story into which Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby could probably breathe a lot of life, but not so much when their life together is splitting the stage in an all-too brief two-and-a-half hour film with 26 years of events that involved every nation in Europe in a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances and interlocking wars and personalities every bit as arresting as the Corsican cuckoo.
In some sense Napoleon reminded me of the panoply of regrettable World War II movies that sprouted throughout the 1970s—films like Tora Tora Tora and Midway. These were larded with every male actor2 the producers could trick or bribe into disgorging chunks of exposition as dull as farm reports in between action scenes stapling together nearly identical cockpit shots with poorly matched gun camera footage of real Zeros and Hellcats ablaze and spiraling into the ocean, likely during altogether different battles. These quasi-documentaries were often drizzled with thin romances or father-son dramas with roughly the same emotional impact as a Bazooka Joe cartoon.
Napoleon shares with these ludicrous spectacles a sense of whiplash as the story ranges between the unimaginable vastness of Napoleon’s Russia campaign, here rendered as a series of tiny, ill-connected vignettes conveying nothing of the distances or time or numbers involved, to the intimacy of two people by turns relishing or despising one another as the film requires. It’s impossible to relate to Napoleon and Josephine because while it’s plain that his ego is what is tearing them apart, there’s no clear sense of what pulled them together in the first place, other than Vanessa Kirby’s admittedly stellar eyes. That’s a lot to ask of a couple of balls of vitreous humor, however electric.
Of course, most of the butts in the seats are going to be there for the battles, of which there are four if you don’t count Egypt, which is absurdly brief—Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino, and Waterloo. Only the second and fourth are presented at any kind of scale. They are beautifully shot and feature some brilliantly choreographed scenes of the sort of well-known era-specific tactics (e.g. infantry squares) one would expect. I was particularly struck by a scout switching horses at a full gallop—this was a real stunt and was breathtaking in spite of its brevity. Unfortunately the battles are marred by the kind of incomprehensible general melees that are de rigueur for Hollywood but which would be the death of any army that tried it, to say nothing of gimmicky tactical tricks and a complete disregard for how Napoleonic armies actually worked, which categorically did not involve 46-year old emperors leading cavalry charges, saber akimbo and slicing through scores of English foreheads. Napoleon was a general, and before that an artillery officer. At the head of a line of cavalrymen he would have provided nothing more effective than target practice for pretty much the entire English army.
There are much better treatments of the Napoleonic wars. The BBC’s War & Peace, from 2016, features a powerful depiction of Borodino, which, despite being told through the single perspective of Paul Dano’s Pierre Bezukhov, achieves a sense of scale much more befitting the significance of the battle in the incomprehensibly huge Russian campaign. 1970’s Waterloo doesn’t skimp, devoting its 15,000 extras to the story of a single day. And of course, one should not skip over Ridley Scott’s own The Duelists, from 1977—his directorial debut—in which David Carradine and Harvey Keitel3 portray two French officers who fight a series of duels throughout the period. The film is tightly focused on the two and their dispute, and the wars themselves are only a backdrop, without any attempts to explain the politics or strategies. And yet it’s a far more effective film—perhaps because that’s how we all personally see history; as an accumulation of individual stories which add up to something much greater than the sum of the parts. Napoleon is bigger than any of these, and yet the overall effect is, sadly, much, much smaller.
I really didn’t intend for this week’s RCB to simply be an extended review of a movie I didn’t like, but Ridley gets me going. A couple of his films—Alien, Blade Runner—number among my favorites. Others are very good, some are bad, and others still bother me in a way that most other directors’ films do not. I’m not sure what that says about him or me, but there it is.
Anyway, I’m circling the drain here and not quite going down it. What I really want to get across is that there’s a change coming to Red Clay Bestiary. Oh I know, this is about the fifth big change I’ve engineered over the past year, but all of that was preface. In a nutshell, what I’ve been struggling with is that I’ve spent all of this time plugging away dutifully and it’s been feeling increasingly like an unpaid job. Most weeks I dread working on it. A lot of folks like this sort of piece or that sort, and will often tell me that whatever I’ve written most recently is my best work. That’s flattering but it makes me feel slightly guilty because, well, many of the pieces I’ve written lately have emerged from desperate last-minute flinging of words into the meat grinder. I reckon there’s preparation going on in my head even when I’m not actively shuffling pixels on the screen but still. I haven’t quite had my heart in it.
I’ve come to realize that all this time I’ve been working for RCB and that the whole point of the thing was to work for me. I have learned one thing, which is that I can stick to a schedule pretty well. So what can I do with that skill?
Well, I can write a book. I can serialize a book, right here in this digital bucket. And as it happens, I have a book in mind.
That’s really all I have for you at the moment. I have a fair idea that this won’t totally take over these pages; rather that there will be periodic installments, between which I’ll just continue doing what I’ve been doing. I know the subject matter of said book—I know that, barring anything unexpected, it will in fact be a historical novel, like Napoleon but less stupid. I don’t know a whole lot beyond that. I won’t tell you the title or even the gist just now. But stay tuned. It’s coming.
And a final note for all those who supported my abortive paid membership campaign a while back. There are more biography cards coming. I have the illustrations; I’ve just been stuck on one particular person. This is a lifelong habit of mine, to carefully and neatly construct complete roadblocks out of nonsense. It’s simply a matter of time before I break through, so bear with me.
Until next time, cheers!4
Yes, I counted.
How else could Erik Estrada ever have gotten a film credit?
Yes, Harvey Keitel playing anything other than a wiseguy from New Jersey is ridiculous but it’s still a terrific film.
👍🏻 BOOK BOOK BOOK!
"That’s a lot to ask of a couple of balls of vitreous humor, however electric."
(Just f*cking brilliant!)