The only passionate response to Ridley Scott’s big-budget bio-pic on Le Petit Caporal came from France. They passionately hated it.* For everyone else, merely uninvolving. And, as usual with Scott, the reason nearly always the same, as narrative filmmaker he’s more docent than storyteller. Meticulously dressed and handsomely presented, we move thru a series of highlight reels; hop, skip & jumping thru Nappy’s incident heavy life, not knowing Who, What, Where, Why or When. The intro titles on screen not nearly enough to keep us informed. Perhaps Name Tags? ‘Hello! My Name Is Talleyrand.’ Pushing fifty (and looking every day of it), Joaquin Phoenix is now barely younger than Bonaparte at death (51), so the crucial wunderkind aspect of his rise doesn’t register. While Vanessa Kirby, 15 years his junior, takes on the famously older Josephine. Only by six years, but people thought she looked like his mother when they met. (Credit Phoenix for rutting as if he learned about sex via animal husbandry in Corsica.) Then, as if we weren’t already distanced enough from the material, Scott loads on hard-to-swallow period or anachronistic music (Haydn to Edith Piaf) before staging an ALEXANDER NEVSKY battle on the ice redux sans Prokofiev. (Note we don’t know a single victim in the horde of drowned men & horses.) Technically, some cutting edge stuff disappoints: sea battle CGI looking little better than old-fashioned model work, same on those serried ranks assembled in the background. Legit live action stuff no doubt cost a fortune and perhaps will have more effect in Scott’s promised (or is that threatened?) longer cut. But why wait? It’s available to not watch right now!
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The first third of Bonaparte’s life remains a cinematic astonishment in Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, but barely survives home screen viewing. While the one completely satisfying portrait of the man lasts all of ten seconds when Slavko Vorkapich, the montage master of Golden Age Hollywood, makes a cameo acting appearance as Napoleon in Rex Ingram’s masterful SCARAMOUCHE/’23. Second place goes to Charles Boyer in CONQUEST/’37. While Phoenix is closer to Marlon Brando’s unhappy Nappy in DÉSIRÉE/’54. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/03/scaramouche-1923.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/conquest-1937.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/desiree-1954.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Maybe Scott has a future in French politics as the only man in decades to unite the Left, Right & Center.
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