Napoleon (2023)

Score: 4 / 5

Thank heaven Ridley Scott is still making movies. His style may not always land for everyone, and his subject matter certainly doesn't, but I've liked every title I've seen of his directorial filmography. With this ambitious biopic and historical war thriller combination, however, I think the vastness that is Napoleon might be slightly beyond Scott's grasp. At least as a lesson in history. The film, while endlessly engaging and fabulous in spectacle, tries to do far too much in its two-and-a-half-hours, and rumor has it that a four-plus-hour director's cut is in the works already. I certainly hope it is.

Scott is here doing what he does best -- or, at least, most famously -- in fictionally dramatizing real historical events mobilized by massive wars. He's also creating a project few filmmakers have dared attempt, though the most immediate comparison point I can conceive might be Oliver Stone's storied (and in my opinion, utterly brilliant) biopic of Alexander the Great. His focus, of course, is here Napoleon Bonaparte, who Scott tries to epitomize from the French Revolution in 1973 (as he apparently watches the beheading of Marie Antoinette) right through his defeat in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. That's a massive amount of time -- and accomplishments -- to fit into any film, but it does flow rather nicely for what amounts to a bullet-pointed summary.

I confess not knowing a lot about the Napoleonic Wars, but I followed this film generally well, though my notes include several questions for light research. While I knew Egypt was part of his empire, I didn't know about the Battle of the Pyramids; while I knew his invasion of Russia is usually considered a failure, I didn't know that Moscow had been abandoned and burned in 1812. A better screenplay would have found ways of providing more context and information in addition to the "dramatic bits" that seem to dominate the dialogue. And really, that's my only complaint with this film in general: David Scarpa's screenplay just doesn't get deeper than a surface-level survey of Napoleon's wars, shallowly avoiding insight or even much explanation while tying together massive set pieces and Big Ideas. Stringing us from battle to battle, the screenplay only dramatizes Napoleon to the extent that he starts as a terrified soldier and ends as a tragically confident emperor, with only an enigmatic and erotic marital arrangement to flavor his life between wars.

The deeper parts of the screenplay -- and yes, they do exist -- are the more melodramatic and private. Scott's film is wielding a dual purpose: one, to chronicle Napoleon's imperial ambitions, and two, to dramatize the obsessive and contentious romantic relationship he shared with Josephine, an aristocratic widow who takes notice of him after his heroic victory in the Siege of Toulon (which is one of the film's best and most graphic battle scenes, and be warned if you dislike the idea of seeing a horse's torso explode from cannonball impact). Their meeting in 1795 starts a lifetime of passionate lovemaking, grueling political intrigue, and letter-writing that apparently served as inspiration for the entire project. Joaquin Phoenix is never less than arresting as Napoleon (though not always believable with his lack of discernible accent and his age, which doesn't always match the age of the character), but it is Vanessa Kirby whose performance deserves more attention. Kirby has the thankless job of playing a mysterious character mostly lost to history, whose sole purpose in the film -- and, arguably, in life -- is to be a mirror of sorts to the emperor, policing his ego, stroking his ambition, and of course providing sustenance for his desires. Josephine's inability to provide Napoleon with an air becomes the central problem in their relationship, but beyond that familiar plotline is a wealth of weighty power dynamics and sensual challenges between them.

Frankly, I'd have liked this film to either be a miniseries (which, with a potential four-plus-hour cut, I guess it essentially will be) or two separate films, one focusing on Napoleon's wars and public persona and one on his private struggles with family and politics. Both are deserving of more screen time and more dramatic and thematic depth. What is it about Josephine that makes Napoleon all but go mad for her? What is it about him that she apparently loves so much? We're never really given insight into their relationship; the actors are both masters of creating backstory and internal conflict with little more than a silent look, but the screenplay could and should help its audience a bit more. Especially since the film suggests to a lesser extent that it's in pursuit of Josephine that Napoleon finds his motivation for warmongering and empire-building. Neither the director nor writer seem interested in making broad statements about Napoleon as a man, tyrant, or anything else; there's nary a moment of insecurity about his height or attempts to compensate (as pop culture would otherwise imply), about colonialism, madness (I mean, not even a hint of insight into the Napoleon Complex, if you please), or anything that makes Napoleon out to be more than a figurehead, fated to rise and fall in preordained beats of life or a cinematic reel.

So, while it's frustrating to not know much more about Napoleon after viewing the film than before, it's also clear that Scott and his team aren't interested in a history lesson or character discussion. Those are movies that could (and should) be made. This is a period war movie, one that takes its apparent purpose as something akin to war epics of decades gone by. It uses relentlessly impressive battle scenes on enormous scale to cow us into awe, alternating these massive sequences with private bedchamber scenes to underscore Napoleon's "home" life and how it interplays with the man we know from history. With the graphic battle scenes, and the film's closing text discussing the estimated three million deaths during the Napoleonic Wars, I wish the film had leaned into an understanding of him as a warmonger, yes, but also a deathmonger; he seems most lively on screen only when battle rages around him and the threat of death is imminent. This would have been a fascinating lens to view the film through, especially given the contrasting desperation for new life Napoleon craves in begetting a son. It's telling that, once his son is born, he completely disappears from the film and is not mentioned even in the closing text.

My Policeman (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Another year, another dull gay romantic drama. Read: gay tragedy. As important and beautiful as these movies can be, most queer audiences -- the kinds who flock to see these films -- had their fill back in the 2000s. Now, two decades later, we haven't come much farther, apparently. One wonders if filmmakers are ambitious to play the heartstrings of awards voters, if they think heartrending stories of closeted gays in forbidden romances are hot topics, or if they themselves just want in on the Brokeback Mountain prestige. I don't mean to decry queer films in general, of course, but only good representation is actually good representation. Thank goodness for this year's Bros, right? But that makes My Policeman feel just that much more tone deaf and disappointing.

An older couple live together, now retired, in a quiet seaside town, each pretty much keeping to him- and herself. Tom (Linus Roache) takes their dog on long walks along the white rocky cliffs, and Marion (Gina McKee) watches wistfully out her windows and putters around the house. Their passionless doldrums are interrupted suddenly when a recent stroke survivor arrives in his wheelchair. The man is Patrick (Rupert Everett), their long-estranged friend, who Marion had volunteered to take in and care for. Patrick seems uncomfortable but grateful, and occasionally tries to bark out resentment from his clenched jaw and barely audible speech. Marion is clearly guilt-ridden. Tom avoids Patrick at all costs. We're quickly launched into their story in vibrant flashbacks, alternating these warm scenes of the past with the dismal, grayscale present.

In the 1950s, Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Harry Styles) meet on a beach in Britain and soon start dating. She's educated and somewhat ambitious, he's humble and dashing and contentedly working-class. Tom becomes the titular policeman soon enough. During their dates, they eventually meet Patrick (David Dawson) in a museum he curates, after he acted as a witness in one of Tom's cases. The trio spend all their time together; often Marion and Tom are hand-in-hand, but Patrick often seems attracted to Marion, who seems happy to encourage their intimate friendship. Until, that is, she espies the two men being rather intimate shortly after her marriage to Tom. 

This revelation of their closeted sexual relationship almost destroys Marion. Nervous and disgusted and heartbroken, she desperately seeks help that won't come back to ruin her beloved husband. The film seems uncertain of its focus: are we meant to sympathize with the frighteningly homophobic Marion, whose prospects at the time are certainly to be ruined and whose love for Tom remains mostly unaltered? Or are we meant to sympathize with Tom and Patrick, doomed under the norms and laws of their country? Tom seems to be in love with both people, but he must lie to Marion to live his truth and he must hide his relationship with Patrick to survive. It's just a lot of the same old shit.

Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Freeheld) seems like a natural fit for a story like this, but that doesn't stop this project from feeling like a boring box he's dejectedly checking off. It seems he found inspiration not from his own wonderful body of work but rather from insipid, sentimental claptrap of the likes of Nicholas Sparks; the film founders in its back-and-forth approach between present and past. I found it difficult, though, to be fair, to know if the dialogue was truly as awful as it sounded or if that was the fault of the actors. The older cast is pretty good, although Everett is utterly wasted in his role. The younger cast tries, bless them, and Corrin and Dawson do pretty well to convey the massive unspoken emotional pains of their experiences. Styles is almost unwatchable; sure, he's pretty enough to look at, but his mannerisms and tone feel like a bumbling fool who doesn't know what he's doing. His delivery is monotonous and riddled with unearned angst. If it's a character choice, it makes no sense as the fulcrum of this love triangle; if it's not, it shows his inexperience as a leading man with embarrassing magnitude. Together, the three have no chemistry whatsoever, even as friends. Despite being fairly attractive and the source material itself, of all things, they are mind-numbingly dull to watch.

It doesn't help that director Michael Grandage (who has met great successes on stage) demonstrates no sense of style, vision, or even inspiration in telling this story. Why is it relevant right now, and what is beautiful in the story? There appears to be only minimal collaboration between him and his team. Grandage seems to want a sexy, sad portrait of unspeakable desires -- see the numerous sex scenes that are about as boring and even cringey as the rest of the film -- while Nyswaner wants sentimental romance and the tragedy of regret and wasted time. Cinematographer Ben Davis works really, really hard to marry the two by using contrasting color palettes and some lovely visuals, but there's only so much he can do. Even the editor seems determined to fix Styles's deficiencies by sharply editing around his scenes, stopping us from seeing his painfully forced emotional reactions to the story, which is funny until it becomes annoying.

Mark me, I don't think it's a terrible film altogether. The present-day stuff is quite nice, cinematography and production design are lovely, and some people occasionally need a tearjerker and it may as well be a queer one. But the unfocused and derivative screenplay -- which mostly utilizes the perspective of a straight woman effectively spying on the men through diary entries -- makes the whole thing a jumbled, unsatisfying slog. And then there's the rushed ending, which might have been powerful (and a shining moment for McKee and Roache specifically) but ultimately squanders whatever psychological and emotional depths developed for these characters in favor of a slapdash bow meant to make everyone feel tired and sad. We're not allowed to understand the characters in this character drama, and so there's no real reason to care what happens to them after they've all done such awful things to each other.

The Happy Prince (2018)

Score: 2.5 / 5

In what is clearly a labor of love, Rupert Everett has delved deep into the character and cultural product that was Oscar Wilde. He fully attempts to embody his hero through acting; he channels absolute creative power, moreover, as writer and director. The film's central metaphor -- that of the eponymous story Wilde would tell children -- is voiced-over in sporadic intervals that creates amazing dramatic tension against the story we see. And while The Happy Prince works hard to educate and celebrate, it is almost never happy and only occasionally made me happy.

To be fair, it's not meant to. Wilde's biting wit and savage sensibilities have been the subject of countless works; this story, however, dramatizes the much-less-known time after his trial and imprisonment with hard labor. In fact, the film is almost exclusively concerned with his aging, his trauma, his despair, and his death. Obese, alcoholic, and weak, he stumbles his way across the screen and through the film, slurring words with a voice that was, surely, once beatific. He's selfish and pitiful, wallowing in misery and poverty while wasting away on gluttonous sin. And, true enough to the time and artist, he preys upon the youthful. I found Everett's representation of what amounts to abuse disturbing -- especially in light of current social movements -- and the pedophilia was not contextualized in the slightest, leaving even someone who knows plenty about Wilde's life confused as to the message being delivered in this film.

Everett views the story, thankfully, not as a straightforward biopic but rather as an expressionistic exhibition of Wilde's state of being. The camera pays close attention to color and light, texture and warmth, and we are left with a clear sensation of a man decaying within his own mind. We are forced to hear endless voiceovers, mostly narrated from snippets of Wilde's story that clash royally with what's happening narratively. It all becomes a dreamlike prison, a maze of audio and visual cues we follow for two good reasons: One, we aren't sure what the purpose is, and two, it's clear the aesthetic is so strictly controlled we don't want to impose ourselves upon it.

This latter point is why, in my opinion, the movie ultimately fails. In depicting so much suffering and failure, the film would have done well to engage the audience, letting Wilde get under our skin and into our hearts. Then again, that might not be faithful to the real Wilde. But the film instead alienates us from him even as it forces us into his headspace. He's totally unlikable but we still manage to feel everything he's going through. It becomes a sort of out-of-body experience, and it took all I could to stay alert, trying to piece together the film before me. Only too clear were Everett's efforts; if only he made his final product as accessible to us as it is for him.

I'm left with a conundrum. Am I impressed with Everett's performance but not his screenplay? Am I impressed with his direction but not his performance? For every compliment I can afford him, I find at least two complaints, but in different aspects. Let us leave it thus: It's a weird movie that deserves a place on the Wilde shelf but certainly not as an end-piece. And it certainly won't make anyone very happy.

IMDb: The Happy Prince