Ridley Scott’s Napoleon director’s cut is streaming on Apple TV+ now – here’re our main takeaways.
I will acknowledge that I may have been in the minority when I left the theatrical cut of Napoleon wishing it could be 48 minutes longer.
After watching 157 minutes of Joaquin Phoenix’s manchild on horseback, not many people walked out of the cinema in November feeling short-changed as far as the runtime went. The film’s marketing had promised a lavish, historical epic, and in an entirely temporal sense, a thousand numb bums across the globe could attest that it had delivered.
But Napoleon wasn’t, in many other ways, your average movie-fied biography of an historical figure. It had grand battles, yes, and plenty of the most famous scenes from the French leader’s admittedly eventful life. But the more intimate moments between Phoenix’s Napoleon and his wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) were unlike anything we’ve seen in a major motion picture before.
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Off the battlefield, Napoleon was portrayed as an uncharismatic incel – at once a complex and accomplished military leader and a petulant man-child. It was a character assassination disguised as a biopic – and I absolutely loved it.
Now, with the surprise release of a 205-minute director’s cut of the film, I’ve gone through with a fine-toothed bayonet (does that work?) to find the key takeaways from the best Ridley Scott movie since The Last Duel (seriously, The Last Duel is also great, watch it).
Josephine gets her me-time
This could, for the first couple of hours or so, be renamed The Josephine Cut. Vanessa Kirby’s empress gets the most additional screentime by far, and while it doesn’t add too many new layers to her character, it does help solidify what’s already there. We see her arrest and imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, for example, where a fellow inmate succinctly sums up the entire film from her perspective: “You can die like a lady, or you can live like me.”
These additions are definitely front-loaded in the film, but go some way to recontextualising some of her decisions later on. The portrait of a woman traumatised by a tragic past, doing whatever she can to survive the new world she’s found herself in, makes her the most sympathetic character in the film by several leagues. That her appearances dwindle as the narrative goes on is a shame, but, as some easily Google-able biographical information will attest, there are some difficult barriers David Scarpa’s script would need to overcome first. In any case, the letters and one-sided conversations Napoleon continues to have with her right up until the final lines of the film make sure her presence is felt all the way to the end. This, really, is her story – Napoleon’s just the one on the poster (and, admittedly, commanding the cannons).
Napoleon (still) doesn’t come out of it well
With the new material focusing largely on character building over demonstrating different ways to fire a musket, most of the thematic undertones of the original cut are still in here, only more so. The first, and most important theme? Napoleon is a twat. Pardon my, er, English.
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If you’ve seen the theatrical cut, you’ll have seen most of the character’s more memorable excesses already. But the longer we spend with Phoenix’s interpretation in this cut, the more unpleasant the man becomes. His relationship with Josephine alternates between controlling and pathetically needy. He makes a habit of asking subordinates if they like him, if he’s doing the right thing, if they blame him for France’s misfortunes, before confidently asserting his own greatness when they inevitably answer in the negative. “When I move, the world moves forward,” he writes to Josephine, as he stands in the frozen wreckage of a carriage train following an invasion of Russia which killed as many as a million soldiers and civilians.
At once incredibly insecure and with no sense of self-awareness to speak of, this Napoleon is a properly 21st century despot – which is a huge part of what makes Scott’s biopic so compellingly contemporary.
Piles
For all the talk of piles Ridley Scott did in the press tour for his film’s theatrical cut, the product sent to cinemas proved surprisingly haemorrhoid-free. Thankfully, the Napoleon Director’s Cut restores all (two) mentions of “the horseman’s disease” in their full glory (but not like that) – the first exclaimed by a doctor in a frozen tent in the heart of Russia, and the second when the emperor starts the Battle of Waterloo with an unhappy trip to the loo.
It’s by far the strangest addition to the film, but hardly comes out of nowhere. It’s difficult to say how much of this stems from the new cut or was always there in the first place, but there’s a consistently dark and absurd sense of humour throughout Napoleon. The contrast between the general’s military might and the whiny, unlikeable man behind the scenes takes a wry look at the pedestal Europe’s most famous figure has remained on for 200 years. The situations he finds himself in are often awkward, messy, and frankly absurd.
Often, when we talk of “humanising” historical characters, we mean it in a positive sense. In Napoleon’s, the treatment Scott gives him has the opposite effect. What better way to bring him down a peg or too than by showing him bleeding from the anus?
“One must not forget”, Napoleon tells Wellington in their newly extended encounter at the film’s end, “that I am only a man.” And sometimes, men get piles.
It’s still the same film
For all the changes Scott makes in his new cut, Napoleon is still more or less the same movie. If you left the cinema last year bored out of your skull or, like Brian Cox, had some fruitier thoughts to share, you’re unlikely to find the Director’s Cut a significant improvement.
At the same time, the new version is in a strange way the more approachable of the two cuts, despite its intimidating-looking runtime. The pacing feels more consistent, the themes are expressed a little more obliquely, and the characterisation of our two leads goes a long way to making the Director’s Cut the definitive version of an already magnificent (in my apparently rather isolated opinion) piece of blockbuster cinema.
If nothing else, the cut really rams home how beautiful Napoleon is (the film, I’m not sure the real man was much of a looker). Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography is simply breathtaking at times, the artistic influence of Jacques-Louis David’s iconic paintings colliding with brutal battle sequences to make easily one of the prettiest Hollywood films of the last few years. Some of the shots would make lovely wallpapers, too; if you really don’t want to hear Joaquin Phoenix shouting about fated pork chops, you could even watch it on mute to roughly approximate an afternoon in the National Portrait Gallery.
And if you loved Napoleon first time around, this cut gives you more of the same. Longer, cleaner, and somehow even less sexy than the version in cinemas, it still has all the makings of becoming Scott’s latest misunderstood masterpiece. I can’t wait for the four-hour version.
Napoleon and its Director’s Cut are now available on AppleTV+
