Oafish Nappy & Scott’s Waterloo

Ridley Scott’s ballyhooed “Napoleon” was utterly destroyed by WSJ’s review. Little wonder. Depicted was an oaf who could not have beaten Europe’s kings in repeated defensive wars ala Israel & offered them a EU 200 years before today’s version.

More improbable oafish history on the big screen: An oaf who spread The Rights of Man throughout the world & gave his country the legal “Code Napoleon” that’s still mostly intact today? An oaf who sold the Louisiana territory to Jefferson, thereby doubling the size of the US in one master stroke (i.e., rather than let the imperialistic UK have it)? The WSJ’s Kyle Smith left little to the imagination of how he’d have answered those questions. He wrote: “Joaquin Phoenix finds Napoleon morose, anguished, petulant & a bit childlike, which reminds me that although I enjoyed his morose, anguished, petulant and a bit childlike performance as the Joker, his decision to play Jesus Christ as morose, anguished, petulant and a bit childlike, in 2019’s little-seen ‘Mary Magdelene,” felt a bit off … Alas, it’s too late for those of us who thirstily awaited Scott’s … attempted return to jolly old ‘60s-style big-budget historical epics that, rejecting a recent cinematic fad for distilling great men into a single episode (as in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’), covers the range of the French soldier-emperor’s life from age 24 until his death at 51…”

Yet the audiences, Smith suggests, will learn nothing about the real man wearing the emperor’s clothes, unless they believe in fairy tales. As the critic waxed, “there is no heroism, no heart & very little great soldiering” by a man who in reality was an insatiable book worm whom many contemporaries thought to look “more like a professor than a soldier.” And, this: “Most of the movie is a vaguely comical swipe at Napoleon in domestic life … Phoenix’s Napoleon could never have commanded so much as a squadron of the Salvaton Army …” It's “Mr. Scott’s Waterloo.” What an anti-climactic dud.

Davd Soul