Napoleon: A Satire of Biopics?

Ridley Scott is known as a director who takes a notoriously lackadaisical stance toward historical accuracy. After all, this is the director of Gladiator, which had one historical advisor resign over inaccuracies in the film, and another ask that his name not appear in the credits. With regard to the artistic deviations from historical reality in Napoleon, Scott said that he often says to historians, “Were you there? No? Well, shut the **** up then.” All this to say that historical inaccuracies in Napoleon should not be surprising. After all, almost all films have inaccuracies for the sake of telling a story—streamlining a complicated series of events, incorporating several real people into one fictional character, omitting major parts of the story entirely in order to boil down the narrative to a 2-hour cinematic experience. But the inaccuracies in Napoleon go a step further, and for a director as experienced and talented as Ridley Scott, there are two interpretations of these errors: Ridley Scott is getting too old and doesn’t care as much as he used to, or (and this is my kinder, more forgiving take) the errors are intentional and signal to the audience that Napoleon is not a run-of-the-mill historical drama but rather a satire of biopics.

I know this theory is a bit of a reach, and I know some of my readers are already rolling their eyes, confident that I’m simply reading too much into a mediocre historical drama from a director past his prime. But please, indulge me for a few moments, allow me to make my argument, and maybe I can persuade you to come over to my side of the movie theater.

I’ll begin at the beginning, and the end, by pointing out that Napoleon’s historical inaccuracies are strongest in the film’s opening and at the film’s end. This signals to me that they are not simply the result of ignorant artistic license, but rather are there to reinforce a theme. The film opens with the arrest and execution of Marie Antoinette. First of all, the guards that escort her down the hall of the palace to the linen closet where she hides with her children are not dressed as the French guards of the time in blue coats. Rather, they look like the British redcoats of the same era, but on the other side of the world. The following scene of her execution shows the guards in their proper attire, sporting blue coats, but such a bizarre costuming error in the very first frames of the film could hardly be a mistake. At Antoinette’s execution, the peasants are jeering and booing her, which are both historically accurate, but they’re also throwing food. Again, this might not seem too strange, but the film’s opening text, which was on screen not sixty seconds earlier, tells us that the peasants revolted against the monarchy because, in part, of food shortages. So during a food shortage, the starving peasants are wasting perfectly good lettuce and tomatoes to throw at the queen before she loses her head? Again, such a logical inconsistency in the film’s first moments must, must exist to signal to us as moviegoers that they are intentional and their purpose is not to fill out the scenery or add visual interest as much as to let us know that the film is not to be taken literally, and perhaps not even seriously.

I should note here that the purpose of biopics is not to educate the audience. Their purpose is always to entertain. To that end, I don’t really care about historical accuracy. If you want to learn about the real Napoleon Bonaparte, go read a book about him. If you want to learn about his life while still staring at a screen, watch a documentary, but don’t turn to Hollywood with the expectation that you’re going to be educated when you buy a movie ticket or rent a film from Amazon.

Pivoting back to Napoleon, I’ve said that the errors of the film signal to the audience a theme. What is that theme? I believe the film is about the tendency of great men to have great flaws, to get caught up in their greatness and turn their own lives into legends, even while they’re still living them. Briefly after conquering Egypt, Napoleon finds out his wife is having an affair, and despite several affairs of his own, is enraged and returns to France to confront her. His infidelities are a simple result of his status, but hers? Unforgivable embarrassments to the greatest conqueror in the world.

Napoleon is unable to see the truth in even his own words. In a scene where he tells a joke about the English lacking honor to Tsar Alexander, the Tsar responds with, “This is not your story.” Later, Napoleon is so caught up in his successes around Europe that he feels emboldened to attempt a conquest of Russia. As he writes to Josephine on the day his army sets out for Moscow, “I see nothing but success in my future.” Cue one of the greatest military blunders in human history, a misstep (or faux pas, as the French would say) so great that it results in Napoleon’s first exile. Later, in his second exile, he tells two young girls that it was he, and not the Russians, who burned Moscow to the ground. We remember, however, that when the Russian capital was set aflame earlier in the film, Napoleon was caught by surprise and incredulous of his officers’ story that the Russians set the fire themselves.

Just like Napoleon is unable to prevent exaggerations from slipping into his own words, the film Napoleon presents to us absurd and humorous retellings of key moments of the emperor’s life. Throughout its runtime, the film includes a number of absurdities (some subtle and others not so much) that reinforce its satirical nature: Josephine dressing much like a prostitute at the soirée where she and Napoleon first meet; during the Coup of 18 Brumaire, Lucien and Napoleon respond to the shouting Jacobins by throwing punches, then calling in the guards to quell the Jacobin violence (this scene is one of several filled with sophomoric, almost slapstick on-screen combat—punches without any force behind them and which clearly don’t hit their targets); marital disputes about lovemaking at a dinner party in front of guests, which devolves into a food fight; the wife of one directory member spends a comical amount of time wailing and flailing as her husband gets arrested; the adolescent sex scenes between Napoleon and Josephine; and a few lines from Napoleon that are less than serious, in particular, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!”

There are a couple of technical reminders of the film’s satirical intent as well. Twice in the film (perhaps there are more, but I counted two) the subject of the frame interacts with the camera itself. Shortly after Napoleon is declared First Consul of France, the camera follows a running horse that throws mud onto the lens. Later, at the Battle of Waterloo, a cannon is hit by a French cannonball and is destroyed, flying off the ground and actually hitting and moving the camera. When I saw this in the theater, I had to stifle my laughter.

At the end of the film, when Napoleon is on his second exile, how is his death depicted? He simply leans to the side until he falls out of frame. The amount of text at the end of the movie is also somewhat comical. You keep expecting the credits to roll, and instead there’s another paragraph of text for you to read, and the font is so small that watching at home makes it difficult to read.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I’m attributing too much to Ridley Scott. Perhaps Napoleon really is just a mediocre, clumsily shot and edited biopic from a director who should have retired fifteen years ago. Maybe the truth is in the middle, and it’s a mediocre satire that never fully shows its hand, but also remains too subtle for anyone to notice it’s satirical. There also exists the possibility that Scott didn’t intend the film to be ironic or parodic at all; that he tried to make a serious biopic about the French emperor that wound up being a comment on biopics more broadly. I don’t think that would make the final product any more or less of a satire. The artist stumbles into genius more often than he purposefully creates it. Regardless of how much talent the man may (or may not) have, I believe Ridley Scott is an artist at heart, and he’s always willing to try something new just to see if it works. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t take it too personally. He just tries again in his next film.

Although I wish the collaboration between Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix could have been a little more well-received, there’s something unique about Napoleon that I think most people, even the critics, missed by expecting another historical drama or biopic. Instead, Scott delivers something different, something that lingers in your mind, even if it’s just to ask yourself over and over again, “What the hell did I just watch?” Hopefully I’ve convinced you to rewatch the film with a slightly different perspective than most audiences had on their first viewing.