The new movie from Ridley Scott, “Napoleon,” with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, runs for two hours and thirty-eight minutes. That’s almost as long as Napoleon’s coronation, at Notre-Dame de Paris, in 1804. The ceremony began at midday and lasted at least three hours. The congregation snacked on chocolate, sausages, and bread: the popcorn of the revolutionary age.
In “Napoleon,” we attend the coronation, but only for a while. Scott is in a hurry to move on to the next event. As in any account of Napoleon’s life, there is an underlying comedy in the very attempt to squash an unruly mob of incidents into a tight dramatic space. “Would you like to see the bedroom?” Napoleon says to his second wife, Marie-Louise (Anna Mawn), and bang: a baby, brought in swaddling clothes for him to dandle. That was quick. At the destructive end of existence, Scott is no less economical. There may be battle scenes to die for—Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino, and Waterloo, plus a dusty glimpse of combat beside the Pyramids—but entire campaigns, elsewhere, are elided or brushed off in a line of dialogue. “I have already conquered Italy, which surrendered without conflict,” Napoleon declares. Tell that to the folk of Binasco, in Lombardy, who rose up against the French, in 1796, and were punished for their temerity. “Having killed a hundred people, we burned down the village, a terrible but efficacious example,” Napoleon wrote.
“Terror” is the first word that is clearly enunciated in the movie. It issues, needless to say, from the mad mouth of Robespierre (Sam Troughton), who expounds upon the rationale of violence and winds up shooting himself in the face. We see a finger probing the wound; in a similar vein, we see Napoleon plucking a cannonball from the lacerated breast of his dead horse. This film is intimate with gore. At the start, we are granted so prime a position, bladeside at the guillotine, for the execution of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) that we can spot the scraps of lettuce in her hair; she has been pelted with vegetables by the crowd. Napoleon is there—watchful, unmoved, taking the temperature of collective rage. Then, during the storming of an enemy fort in Toulon, by night, there’s an extraordinary closeup of his features, striped with blood; he puts his hands over his ears to muffle the boom of the cannons. Is he at home in the mayhem, ecstatically calm, or horrified at all that he has unleashed?
What Phoenix summons, in other words, is the most inward of Napoleons. Even when he’s in company, or surveying the deployment of his troops, or blustering with outrage, you feel that he’s prowling the battlements of his own brain. It could be argued, of course, that brooding goes with the territory. Think of Charles Boyer’s Napoleon, in “Conquest” (1937), on a snowbound balcony, saying “I love you,” sotto voce, to Marie Walewska, his Polish paramour, without even looking in her direction—quite a feat, considering that she’s played by Greta Garbo. (Poor Walewska doesn’t even rate a mention in the new film.) But Boyer gave a late-Romantic reading of Napoleon, whereas Phoenix, evading doominess and charm alike, suggests a man who is naggingly conscious of fulfilling a role and already arranging his place in history. “Do I resemble my portrait?” he asks Marie-Louise. Entering a church, in a deserted Moscow, he takes his seat, enthroned at the high altar, as if striking a pose for a painter. If he notices the pigeon droppings all around, he ignores them.
Such a pitch of self-consciousness goes far deeper than vanity. It’s as if Napoleon were forever trying out what manner of person he should and could potentially be. Hence the ardor of his acolytes, confronted with a new model of behavior, who crown him with plaudits such as “our Caesar.” Nor is he alone in his ambition. His first wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), observes it in him, shares it, and toys with the power that it bestows. “I want you to say I am the most important thing in the world,” he tells her, commandingly, yet she—a widow, not a warrior—is somehow his superior in worldliness. The question that she puts to her maid, after her first exchange with him, could hardly be more Napoleonic: “Do I look like I’m in love?” Kirby feasts on the delicious ennui of her character; even in the throes of their coupling, she seems infinitely bored, as if wondering what she’s going to have for lunch. Much later, when Napoleon calls her a pig and a beast, she returns the fusillade. “You are just a brute who is nothing without me,” she says. At the dissolution of their marriage, she stifles a laugh, and then weeps.
So, is “Napoleon” dynamite? Not if you’re a historian. Napoleonic scholars, of whom there are touchy battalions, will be up in arms from the outset, noting that Marie Antoinette’s hair was shorn before her decapitation, and that Napoleon, rather than witnessing her death, was in the South of France. Do not make the mistake, though, of assuming either that Scott is blind to such discrepancies or that he cares a jot. No film that presents Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington, as this one does, could be accused of a craving for authenticity. Scott’s business is to move his men and women around the board, as it were, and to play a bracing game with the facts. Few directors can rival the swagger with which he cuts from the grand overview to the telling, tiny detail: from the squares formed by British infantry at Waterloo, for instance, to the neat hole made by a musket ball in the corner of Napoleon’s hat.
If the movie falters, it’s because, as a bio-pic, it cannot do otherwise. Even the most expert of storytellers is defeated by the essential plotlessness of the form: one damn thing after another. For all its galvanizing set pieces, “Napoleon” boasts neither the shape nor the dash of “The Duellists” (1977)—Scott’s début feature, a tale of revenge set in the Napoleonic era—and little of the momentum that drove “Gladiator” (2000), his previous collaboration with Phoenix. The imaginative zeal of that film was liberated by its fictional hero, Maximus, and by his feud with the imperial villain, Commodus, whereas Phoenix’s Napoleon must do double duty. He is Maximus and Commodus, rolled into one, and it’s a treacherous theme for an epic: a man doing battle with himself.
How thrilling it was to learn that the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda, the director of such tender family dramas as “I Wish” (2011) and “Shoplifters” (2018), is titled “Monster.” Finally, a change of tack. Do we get to see scores of families being tenderly stomped on by Godzilla? Regrettably not. Yet there is a rumble of the apocalyptic in “Monster.” It kicks off with a towering inferno. A typhoon is next, then a mudslide. One person jumps from a moving car. Another stands on the brink of a roof. A third flails around on a road, the worse for drink, drowning his sorrows in the rain.
Sakura Ando, the star of “Shoplifters,” returns here as a young widow, Saori, who lives with her only child, a fifth grader named Minato (Soya Kurokawa). He seems to be a worried soul, but what those worries are is far from clear. It’s alleged that he was struck, in the classroom, by a teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), and Saori, who is no pushover, goes to school to complain. The principal, Mrs. Fushimi (Yûko Tanaka), is oddly indifferent. No fewer than five members of the staff rise and bow to Saori, in contrition, but notice how the moment is framed: she is hemmed in by the apologizers as if trapped in a crowd. Although Kore-eda has a reputation for aplomb—for exploring rather than ruffling social custom—I sense real subversion in that shot. Etiquette becomes a threat.
After three-quarters of an hour or so, the screen goes black. When the story resumes, we discover that we’re back at the start, the difference being that the action now revolves around Mr. Hori. We don’t see things exclusively from his viewpoint—this is no “Rashomon” (1950)—but the center of narrative gravity has shifted, for sure. The same thing occurs in the third movement of “Monster,” most of which is occupied by the friendship, hitherto merely glimpsed, between Minato and a boy in his class, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), who is bullied both at home and at school but who, heaven knows how, preserves a sunny resilience. You expect the movie to darken, and yet, as if under Yori’s influence, it is lit by shafts of happiness. The two lads find an abandoned train car, in the woods, and make it their refuge. Any port in a storm.
If possible, watch “Monster” more than once. Not that it’s a puzzle that begs to be solved. What Kore-eda doles out are not revelatory surprises so much as gradual enlightenments, and our attitude toward the characters is forbidden to settle or to stick. Mrs. Fushimi, for example, has recently lost a grandson, in awful circumstances, so she isn’t being frosty or mean; she’s just shell-shocked, and one beautiful closeup of her, in the third part of the film, invites us to have pity on this woman from whom we initially flinched. As for the title, to whom does it refer? There are various candidates, but I side with the teacher who kvetches about the parents. “They’re more trouble than their kids, these days,” he says. “They’re monsters.” ♦
