We Feel Like We Win When We Lose

I am here to tell you that it's usually not a good sign when you find moral outrage bubbling up within yourself while watching a movie. That's not always true, obviously -- there are movies that are actively trying to make you feel morally outraged. Movies that want you to leave them shaken and angry and ready to go march in the streets or at least, you know, think about doing that until the movie's effects wear off and you go home and eat dinner and go numb over the world again or whatever. 

But Ridley Scott's Napoleon isn't that. Or at least it doesn't achieve that, if that's what it was going for. And there are indeed moments where you think that it was perhaps going for that -- at its end, right before the end credits, we're given a list that rattles off the woeful cost of human life that that the ego of Napoleon Bonaparte, French military strategist turned emporor turned psychological condition, was responsible for stomping into the mud, and it numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

And yet Ridley Scott's movie never makes you feel that horrible cost. What Ridley Scott's movie -- in the state it is being released in anyway; we're all aware there's a much longer cut that exists and perhaps that one had the time to drive home its themes better -- does instead is make us sit up in our chairs when the big battle scenes come on, and ooh and ahh ourselves silly over all the money and all of the spectacular collective effort that went into making those losses of life as cinematically gorgeous as possible. People are drowned and trampled and exploded with such ferocious beauty, y'all!

And even as the movie sits -- at just under three hours, which is I believe about ninety minutes shorter than Ridley said his preferred director's cut is -- I grew weary of it all. And not in the way of "War is hell" that better war movies have made me feel. Just in the way of "This is serving no purpose." The film has nothing coherent to say. There is a kernel of something happening with Joaquin Phoenix's buffoonish cuckold take on the character that continually gets drowned out by the film's own ambition. 

We're given no foothold with any of the characters -- his romance with Josephine (an admitedly transfixing Vanessa Kirby) just sort of happens with a quick series of scenes that express very little. I understand wanting to leave it vague, how much she is using him versus whether she actually has any feelings for him at all. But all interiority is stripped off and three hours of scenes just happen, one after the other -- we feel no emotional connection to any of it. 

And yes, Joaquin is too interesting and weird a performer to not be worth watching anyway. The movie is a lot of him running around and grabbing the corners of the tablecloth and trying to keep the buffet from tumbling over onto the floor and to serve us a coherent meal amid the madness. Perhaps the scenes where the characters get to breathe were left on the cutting room floor for this edit. I can't answer that. All I can say is that as the film stands it's a jumble, a cacophony without purpose.

I'll give it one thing -- it made me think we don't ever need to make another war movie ever again. I have had sufficient. The oh so exhilirating propaganda of them. And Napoleon is a tough fit for that feel because you can sense it straining for its opposite -- its "Great Man" is a jackass and Scott lingers on the ocassional painterly atrocity. There are far worse purveyors of pro-militarism -- ask any Transformers or Marvel movie. Napoleon is just more frustrating because it pretends to be something it doesn't achieve since the film itself is deeply enraptured with its own prowess. One dare say Napoleon suffers from its own Napoleon Complex. Big movie, dwarfed message.