Ridley Scott's Napoleon

Is Ridley Scott's Napoleon worth seeing? Yes. 

Is it a good film? Not really.

It's a blockbuster of sorts, with countless battle scenes full of shouting and explosions, but it's shot in what seems to be natural light, and most of the film has an unpleasant grayish tinge.

Interspersed amid these roaring scenes, Scott gives us extended looks at the time Napoleon spent "at home" with the Empress Josephine, but these scenes don't have much depth. Josephine found the arrangement expedient; Napoleon nurtured a sentimental affection during his time away, and wrote Josephine often. But he also wanted an heir, and it appears he overlooked no opportunity to bring such an event about when he wasn't charging across Egypt, Italy, Germany, and Russia in pursuit of an ever-shifting congeries of aristocratic opponents.

As a means of setting the scene politically, we spend the first part of the film watching brief episodes of mayhem during the early days of the Revolution, followed by the Convention, the Reign of Terror, a few back-room deals during the Directory, and the final coup d'état that brought Napoleon to power. That's a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short span of time, and beyond the inevitable Robespierre, the individuals involved will be strangers to most viewers: Sieyes, Junot, Barras. Who?

Perhaps I underestimate the educational level of the movie-going public, but I suspect most viewers will be unaware that Napoleon's enduring achievements have been omitted from the film entirely.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica summarizes his career as follow:

"Napoleon ... left durable institutions on which modern France was built up, including the Napoleonic Code, the judicial system, the central bank and the country’s financial organization, military academies, and a centralized university."      

A more detailed on-line source reminds us that the Code Napoleon "codified France’s confused jumble of laws and guaranteed property rights, equality before the law, freedom of religion, and the abolition of feudalism."

In time Napoleon's military conquests, which eventually included almost the entirety of Western Europe, obliterating numerous feudal and ecclesiastical states, and that led a generation or two later to the unification of Germany and Italy and the liberalization of legal codes throughout the region.

It would have been impossible, not to mention boring, to depict such bourgeois accomplishments in even a three-hour biopic, but without reference to these details, we're left with a feeble portrait of a strangely anemic personality, and that makes it difficult to accept the fact—though it is a fact—that Napoleon stirred the loyalty and devotion of hundreds of thousands of men, not only in France but throughout Western Europe, many of whom lost their lives as a result.

The best reason to see Napoleon, aside from the costumes and the military re-creations, is that it may kindle the desire to learn more about the real story. (When we got home, I pulled my copy of J.M. Roberts' History of the World off the shelf. I can't remember the last time I did that.)

Though Scott's Napoleon is never boring, as I watched it I was reminded of several other films on similar themes with greater depth but narrower focus. Erich Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke (2001) depicts the harrowing days of the Terror in Paris, when friends became enemies and no one could be trusted. In La Nuit de Varenne Italian director Ettore Scola dramatizes the phase of the revolution before Louis XVI was executed. And Start the Revolution Without Me, as you might guess from the title, is a spoof of the early days of the revolution starring Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland. "I thought it was a costume ball ..."

And while we're at it, why not mention Woody Allen's early masterpiece, Love and Death, in which, amid lots of other silliness, Napoleon is outraged with his bakers because the Duke of Wellington's pastry-encrusted beef is a big hit, while his multi-layered pastry still isn't flaky enough.

Let me add that although Ridley Scott's depiction of the battle of Waterloo is grand, it might have been a good idea for him to remind viewers which side General Blücher was on. For my money, those expansive scenes are well worth seeing, but carry less of a punch than the famously chaotic literary passages in Thackerey's Vanity Fair and Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, both told from the point of view of a bewildered foot soldier who has trouble finding the battlefield.   

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To keep the flavor of the Revolution alive, after the film we drove downtown to a restaurant in the North Loop called Maison Marguax, where the starter for the sourdough bread has been kept alive for more than a century, so they say. The bar is a nice place to sit on a drizzly afternoon in mid-December. I found the jambon beurre baguette a little short on ham, but the "oui burger" was robust and buttery. The pomme frites, served in a shiny metal cup, were delicious, though it seems they forgot to add the tarragon to the béarnaise sauce. But it's possible my palate simply lacks the required finesse.

All of the servers wore vests covered with intricate blue brocade and several were wearing nose rings. One young women had recently completed a degree program in Madison in home economics and was now earning some money as she pondered her next career move. Another seemed to have a slight accent, and I asked her where she was from. Marseille?  

"You've probably never heard of it," she said. "I'm from Forest Lake."

"What? I'm from Mahtomedi, just down the road. We pass Hugo often on our way to O'Brien State Park."

"I love that park," she said.

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And where, you might ask, does Jesus enter into all of this? 

Not only did the Napoleonic period advanced the cause of universal brotherhood by expanding citizenship and economic opportunity to Protestants, Jews, and free-thinkers, as I mentioned above, but at the same time, the incalculable violence and bloodshed of the period convinced many that the facile truths of the Enlightenment were grossly inadequate to the task of harnessing the energies involved in those social developments.

And we've been struggling to maintain a balance between the ground of faith and the blue skies of liberty ever since.