What can one say? Ahistorical, pointless, very near to spoof, it feels like an expensive practical joke. Napoleon is just . . . there. Quiet, behatted, very dull, and you have no inkling as to what makes him special.
His torrid love for Josephine is perplexing – she spreads her legs to give him a look see, and he is forever entranced, even after he has to divorce her because she is barren.
That was the first half, before I took a gummie and got to The Battle of Austerlitz, and then, the film was more of a gas. Still terrible, but better attuned to my state.
Joaquin Phoenix gives one of the funniest, most wretched performances I’ve ever seen, defensible only because it seems justified, given director Ridley Scott’s recounting:
“He’ll come in, and you’re fucking two weeks’ out, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” Scott said about Phoenix. “I’ll say, ‘What?!’ ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Oh God. I said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ We sat for 10 days, all day, talking scene by scene. In a sense, we rehearsed. Absolutely detail by detail.”
I kind of doubt there was any rehearsal. Phoenix did not bother with a generic classical accent, nor Brit nor, God forbid, a French lilt, so he sounds like an assistant manager at the Petaluma Best Buy.
He is either heavy-lidded to the point of napping or he’s gonzo.
Destined to become a cult classic.
filmvetter 