Americans are so used to seeing history played by Americans that the oddity of it hardly registers anymore. Charlton Heston was the Spanish El Cid and the Hebrew Egyptian Moses and the Judean Ben-Hur—believe it or not, he won an Oscar for that one—and his Midwestern accents were taken for granted whomever he played and wherever the character was supposed to have lived.
And why not? No one expects the actors in a production of “Julius Caesar” to speak good Latin. Fiction is the premise of all fictions, and that simple truth, along with the (perhaps declining) companion truth that, for the most part, movie stars are made in America, is enough to explain the phenomenon. Indeed, the whole point and rationale—the raison d’être, as we say in English—of the theatrical arts is to extend our circles of compassion through acts of creative empathy: we want people who are unlike the characters they play to inhabit them so that in acts of sympathetic resonance we too expand ourselves. It’s why we love Laurence Olivier’s Shylock, or, for that matter, Russell Crowe’s gladiator.
Yet, when one has something, if no more than a big toe, resting in another culture, the oddity resonates. Though Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon, for the most part ably, in Ridley Scott’s much talked-of new movie of the Emperor’s life and battles, it’s still disconcerting that he says his lines not only in English but more or less with exactly the same accents—and using exactly the same slightly paralyzed set of expressions—with which he inhabited Johnny Cash. The cast of his character remains the cast of his character, which, in classic movie-star manner, Phoenix adjusts but does not significantly vary from role to role; he is no Lon Chaney, nor nearly an Olivier, inventing a new face and voice for each role.
This oddity has not been missed in the French reception to the film. Almost all French commentators italicize the ambiguities of Napoleon’s historical role—was he the reincarnation of Alexander the Great or the sinister precursor of Hitler? Perhaps the sole exception is the far-right polemicist and onetime Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who contributed a laudatory story to the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles with the cover line “L’empereur anti-woke.” “Woke” has become, however improbably, an omnipresent borrowed word in French polemics, particularly on the anti-American far right. You might suppose that those who believe that America is colonizing French culture would find a French word around which to organize their disdain, but they don’t. They use the American word—disdainfully, but they do. It’s as if, in anti-French polemics, we insisted on condemning their undue sang-froid. Apparently, no one has stopped to consider the power of a culture that forced you to borrow its language to condemn it.
But most of the arguments against “Napoleon” were about language in another way, and more nettled. “The film is not troubled by the fact that these two . . . warring factions speak the same language (English), which never ceases to feel odd,” a film critic at Le Monde wrote. “Directed by a Briton who has long reigned over Hollywood, Napoleon is a film that essentially reminds us that the Empire has changed hands since Waterloo.” (With that slightly gnomic formula, the critic means that Hollywood runs the world as once the French did.) One can, to be sure, only imagine how Americans would feel seeing a wildly expensive and elaborate movie made about the life of Abraham Lincoln with Gérard Depardieu in the lead, and with wartime Washington perfectly realized and Gettysburg thrillingly re-created, but with everyone from bedroom to battlefield muttering and roaring in guttural French and using idiomatic French expressions to summon up the American ones—“Ah, alors!,” “Sacré bleu,” “Monsieur le President,” and so on. Such a film would convey the surreal cultural dislocation, not to mention unintended comedy, that “Napoleon” provokes in native French speakers. This is not so much a vexed issue of cultural appropriation as a more straightforward one of comic incongruity. Though languages do not, in truth, enclose singular domains of meaning, there are still patterns of behavior, ways of addressing the world, acculturated norms of discourse and style, that affect all members of a linguistic practice.
To take one subtle and circular example, the French aristocrats in “Napoleon” are played mostly by English actors affecting upper-crust English accents that rather betray the equivalent speech pattern in French, which is not clipped and reserved but sonorous and rhetorically sinuous. (The foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand would not hesitate to orate at his emperor, rather than interrogate him politely, as he does here.) That rhetorical tone of French conversation—still dominant now, and overwhelming in the very rhetorical early nineteenth century—is dislodged by the clipped manner of those Brits, not to mention the Method-y pauses and mumblings with which Phoenix works, in a style that is eerily Brando-esque. (Who also once undertook to play Napoleon.)
But this means that, when an actual British upper-cruster, in this case the Duke of Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, appears, he has to go way over the top in order to distinguish himself from the clipped Brits playing the French. He has to become a kind of outrageous caricature of English upper-crustness, all snorts and sneers, so that (this is the circular bit) he ends up performing exactly like the horse-faced and humorless Brits traditionally caricatured by the French, as in, for instance, the Astérix comics.
It’s the fiendishly hidden English prejudices of the movie, though, that the French find most pernicious. “This film was made by an Englishman” was the historian Patrice Gueniffey’s blunt verdict in the magazine Le Point, “and openly anti-French.” (Gueniffey has written two mostly admiring books about the Emperor.) The many historical anomalies in the movie—which are bound to be there—are viewed with his suspicious eye as part of a pattern of anti-French sentiment. Napoleon was not anywhere near the execution of Marie Antoinette, as he is shown to be at the start of the movie, and this makes it seem as if Napoleon’s authoritarianism was the reaction to the Reign of Terror, true only in a very general sense that Hitler’s rise was tied to the previous Weimar inflation—there are many missing steps in the sequence. But this is, as in both Edmund Burke and “A Tale of Two Cities,” the traditional British way of imagining the revolution: the bloody-minded French need a boss, or they go mad.
Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, meanwhile, is represented as a kind of creepy mix of loot-taking and pyramid-destroying, though in fact Bonaparte and his men never aimed cannons at the peaks of pyramids, as they do here, and the expedition came complete with an earnest set of scholars, including the great Vivant Denon, and led eventually to Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta stone, taken from Egypt by Napoleon, was in turn taken from him by the Brits—it still lives in the British Museum—and so Napoleon’s sagacious purpose in Egypt is presumably deliberately left out of the “British” movie.
Worse still, from the French view, the Emperor is portrayed as a clumsy lover. One of the current Bonapartist pretenders—there are two, with different lineage—the Prince Murat, a descendant of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, was so offended by this that he was moved to write indignantly in Le Figaro on behalf of the Emperor’s erotic equipoise. (There are two ungainly scenes of Napoleon having sex with Joséphine, fully dressed and from behind.) The Emperor, the Prince protested, was shown making love “like a clumsy, awkward and frightened little boy,” but then he added, no wonder, since he was throughout portrayed as “clumsy, infantile, cruel, indecisive and weak.” (The pretender still recommended the film, seemingly on the ground that getting people thinking Bonaparte is always a good idea.)
Yet what truly offends French opinion about the film is a very French thing: the failure to sufficiently dramatize administrative excellence. Napoleon, a reasonable counterintuitive case can be made, was a mediocre general but an excellent national manager—he lost key battles and made doomed decisions to try to invade England by sea and then Russia by land, but the civil code he midwifed into existence remains today, and his ideas of meritocratic advancement, of careers “open to the talents,” were genuinely new and enduring. One thing the film doesn’t make clear—in some part at least because that play of accents won’t allow class divides to be appropriately marked—is that the people surrounding Napoleon had risen from the ranks, and his generals and marshals were as likely to be Corsican riffraff as Bourbon aristocrats. Napoleon was a hands-on manager and promoter of men—he once even wrote sympathetically about a lowly corporal with a drinking problem.
Gueniffey also insists that the casualty numbers that run in the credits at the end of “Napoleon,” intended to make one aware of the horror inflicted by the man whom the film has just spent the past two and a half hours heroizing, are greatly inflated. In any case, the perpetual choice between the two Napoleons—the revived Alexander or the premature Hitler—will not be settled here. The actor Albert Dieudonné, who played Bonaparte in Abel Gance’s legendary five-and-a-half-hour silent version, was buried in his Napoleonic costume. Phoenix seems likelier to go to his grave as Johnny Cash.
Still, the cult of the Emperor won’t end, and even an often awkward film can’t end it. In several scenes, Napoleon is shown being sketched by artists even as he acts as Emperor, and that part is true: charismatic tyrants attracted a better class of artists then. David, Géricault, and Ingres were all in his immediate train—a score that no contemporary dictator could equal, although perhaps only because there was a better class of artists around. After all, Napoleon was able to fool many men of genius into thinking that he might be the bringer of republican ideals, as with Beethoven and the “Eroica,” written in Napoleon’s honor until Beethoven figured out who he really was. (“Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!”)
When Napoleon fell and the French painters sighed and went to work for the mediocre royals who followed him, they did not do good work—until Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” made for the revolution of 1830, restored the nobility of revolutionary painting, which retains its own peculiar and glamorous aura to this day. But, then, the romantic glory of revolution is perhaps the most distinct cultural accent left to us by the era and its Emperor. It explains why Napoleon movies, never made well, will never stop being made, in whatever language lies at hand. ♦
