Having recently read Adam Zamoyski’s Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth I feel confident in assuming that Ridley Scott used it as his guide for his recent cinematic outing. The letter writing and relationship angle in particularly is lifted almost directly from the pages. Now, I can’t quite call his movie a biopic, because it feels more like a vehicle for Scott’s own predilections than anything else. Small man syndrome, indeed.
How can the life of a man like Napoleon be captured on screen? Clearly it can’t. Scott left out vast swathes of history. For example. there is nothing of Napoleon’s early life, nothing of his conquests in Italy, nothing of his legislative process and nothing even of what would be his most filmic escapade, the retreat from Russia. Quite literally the key moments of his life are removed in favour of the myth-making ‘whiff of grapeshot’ or the cute story of how he met Josephine.
There is little more than lip service in this movie. The battle of Austerlitz is reduced to a cheap gimmick to provide a metaphor for tactical prowess. The moment where Napoleon writes back from the Russian campaign is one example picked from a litany of similar exercises to show how Napoleon falsified battlefield reports, but instead of being a historical record, it makes him seem one-time petty. Similarly we have one scene where Napoleon hands out bread to his troops, but it comes across as exploitative, rather than emphasizing how he had always been close with his troops. You cannot reduce Napoleon down to mere moments.
Perhaps TV really could do the man justice. As a film, this didn’t work. In trying to adhere to the form of a movie, Scott had to cut elements, and yet these sacrifices led to a unsatisfying experience.