Napoleon

 Everyman Bristol

There is a sea shanty about the life of Napoleon. It's based, rather ironically, on a French song, which is why the chorus goes "Way-hey-ya! John Francois!" It gets the great man's life down to five verses. First he fought the Prush-ee-ons, then he fought the Rush-ee-ons. He went to Mos-i-coh but lost his army in the snow. He was exiled to El-ee-boh. He went to Waterloo where he got his overthroo. He was exiled to Saint Helen's Isle, where he broke his heart and died. Way-hey-ya, John France-Wah! There are additional verses which cover the theory that he was poisoned in St Helena; and add rather twentieth century jokes about French Military Defeats. 

Ridley Scott's epic tells the tale on a slightly larger canvas. It's clearly the kind of film they don't make any more. It has a cast of thousands, or at any rate, thousands of CGI avatars, and buckets and buckets of purely cinematic gore. I didn't stick around to the end of the credits, but I assume that no actual French Queens were harmed during the making of the movie. 

I really couldn't get the sea-shanty out of my head. Because what I felt I was watching was essentially a pageant; a series of Scenes From The Life of Napoleon. Very thankfully, each vignette is introduced with a caption telling us where and when we are and what is going to happen, and which European nobles will be appearing in the scene, which keeps us from getting completely lost. Sellars and Yateman taught us a long time ago that history is whatever is Memorable. I have a French O and A level, so I suppose at one time I must have known about the Napoleonic Wars. But I am afraid that none of it has turned out to be Memorable. 

In fact, I understand the word Napoleonic mainly to mean "what 25mm metal soldiers used to consist of before Games Workshop invented Space Orks." I am sure I wasn't the only one who looked at the longshots in the final battle and thought "Ooo, that reminds me of a set of Airfix Figures I once owned?" So I was quite interested to find out what actually happened and in what order. I don't think I knew that Napoleon divorced Josephine and found a new Empress because she couldn't get pregnant, and that it was the French themselves who sent him into his first exile as a payment for completely buggering up the Moscow campaign. 

The film generates a general sense that we are rushing along a broadly historical trajectory, although I gather that the individual details are rarely accurate. We rush from Marie Antoinette being pelted with rotten fruit like something out of a Jeremy Clarkson editorial to former aristocrats being released from the Bastille and resuming their decadent lifestyle with indecent haste. I knew that the Revolution made a big deal out of abolishing God, but was surprised that the Catholic church featured prominently at Boney's set piece coronation. 

But I didn't get much sense of the porquois et ou pours. I suspect that there is a very dramatic film to be made about the coup d'etat in which we are show how the Three Consuls overthrow the Directory; how Napoleon emerges as First Consul -- king in all but name -- and is finally crowned Emperor. Such a film would show us his his genius for politics and tactics in close up detail. Here, the coronation just seems to be the next thing which happens. Clever general, coup, emperor, retreat from Moscow, way-hay-ya. I was weirdly reminded of one of those Beatles biographies where the fab four seem to go from sleeping in a bathroom in Hamburg to being the most famous people in the world in the space between two paragraphs.  Which may indeed be how fame sometimes works. 

The battles are impressively staged: we see just enough to believe that Napoleon is the greatest general who ever lived, without being too troubled with the details. His reputation-making victory at Toulon left me wondering why it hadn't occurred to the English to put at least one guard on the castle walls. And all he seems to do in Egypt is stand on a box to look at a mummy and blow up a couple of pyramids, before rushing home to check on the rumours that Josephine is cheating on him. 

Given that the film is trying to deal with the whole sweep of Napoleon's life, it's a fairly shrewd dramatic move to focus inordinately on his relationship with the Empress: this is the one thread which seems to carry some dramatic and emotional weight, and where there is some tension around how things are going to turn out. She's the only character apart from Boney who's consistently present throughout the picture. I liked the fact that the monumentally epic scenes in Russia are intercut with the General's very human letters home to his wife. When he comes to Moscow he is overcome by ice and snow, and Moscow is a blazing, so he loses the bonny bunch of roses, oh. (That's a different shanty.) The scenes in which Josephine is forced to publically divorce Napoleon for the good of the realm are genuinely moving; and it is rather touching that he continues to love her and write to her even after he has married the fifteen-year-old Princess Someone of Somewhere in order to generate the required heir. 

We believe that Napoleon is a truly great man, because he tells us so himself, but I never get any sense of a mighty intellect at work. (His ordinariness may be part of the point of the story; but we still have to be persauded that a little man with a silly hat could sway the destiny of a nation.) Even Waterloo, the longest single section of the film, seems to rollock on by without any real sense of drama. Rupert Everett's Wellington isn't much more than a face with a posh accent. There was a bijou momenette where I thought they had inadvertently cast Stephen Fry as the ron duke. The action is intense and lush and there is plenty of acting, but it never solidifies into a story or a drama.

At the beginning of the film, Josephine sends her son to Napoleon to ask for the sword of his father, who was executed during the Terror. (Napoleon shrewdly picks out a random sword and pretends.) This reminded me of a line from another song when young Napoleon falls down on his bended knee and begs his father's life from the elder Napoleon, which he grants most manfull-ee. But I suspect that folk singers are no more worried about the factual details than Ridley Scott. 

Private Eye has already done the joke about how most of us expected the film to be shorter. But probably it is too big, too long and too ambitious to judge on the basis of a single viewing. 

Am I going to go and see it again? Probably. But not tonight, Josephine. 

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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