Napoleon Ending Explained: The French Mistake
Charlie Chaplin once allegedly said, "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." That observation holds even more truth when "life" is swapped for "history"; after all, when looking back over humanity's seemingly never-ending tally of blunders, foolish short-sightedness, lazy handwaving, backpedaling, hatefulness, obfuscation, crimes of passion and other mean-spirited and/or boneheaded screw-ups that have resulted, snowball effect-like, in the messed up world we are all doomed to live in today ... well, you're either crying or laughing.
Judging by the films he's made over his stunningly prolific 46-year directing career, Ridley Scott appears to have chosen laughter. That's not to say he's a comedian, mind you; only real sickos would be likely to throw on "Blade Runner" or "The Counselor" in order to relax and have a chill time. Yet Scott's misanthropic humor is undeniably present in everything from the Lovecraftian coldness of "Alien" to the erudite cannibal hero of "Hannibal" to the procedural goofs in "The Martian" and the foppish toxic masculinity of "The Last Duel."
That latter film, combined with Scott's debut feature, 1977's "The Duellists," seems to most closely presage his current historical fiction (emphasis on fiction) opus, "Napoleon." While the real-life Napoleon Bonaparte has his admirers even in this day and age, there's no question that there's at least an aspect of comic tragedy surrounding the man; his greatest failure (which resulted in the loss of 50,000 lives) is best known today as a pop song by ABBA. Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's condensation of Napoleon's life into 157 minutes (at least until Scott's 4-hour director's cut comes along) looks at how the man, in reaching for greatness, ended up slipping on one of history's banana peels.
Can he do it? Of Corsican
Scott and Scarpa make their aims with "Napoleon" known right off the bat, as the film's opening titles play over scenes depicting the Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette (Catherine Walker), being led to her death at the guillotine by the decree of the people of France participating in the Revolution. Despite her head being held high as she's ridiculed, spit on, yelled at, and pelted with various objects before her execution, there's no denying that this woman is coming to a swift and ignoble end.
While the Federalist revolts of the Revolution are taking place, the new, emerging rulers of the country are realizing that their lands must be purged of invading forces from without along with the monarchy from within. At the behest of the Convention, Captain Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) is given the opportunity to demonstrate his worth to his army and his country by devising a plan to take the port of Toulon back from the Anglo-Spanish fleet.
As a Corsican himself and thus seen by the French as inferior for a variety of reasons, Napoleon takes this opportunity to heart, scouting the grounds and fort of Toulon personally before deciding that taking the opposing force's artillery would be their paramount objective. During the battle, Napoleon's horse is blown open by a cannonball, and yet the man charges forward despite being covered with his companion's blood. After the battle is won, Napoleon is publicly commended for his efforts, and makes a point of digging out the cannonball that killed his horse, handing it to his brother Lucien (Matthew Needham) as a memento for their mother.
Female trouble
As if keeping a bloodied cannonball wasn't indicative enough that Napoleon has a bit of a complex when it comes to trying to prove himself and his worth, as he begins to climb the ladder of success and influence in the army, he insists on wearing his full officer's uniform at all times, even to social events. At one of these parties, he spies (literally and figuratively) a woman whom he can't stop staring at. It turns out this woman is Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), a former aristocrat whose husband was killed during the Revolution. As Napoleon pursues Joséphine (using methods as unscrupulous as picking a random confiscated sword to return to her son, pretending it was their father's heirloom), the woman enjoys the attention and status of what is clearly an increasingly important man and agrees to marry him. With one caveat: during a private moment, Joséphine bares her vagina to Napoleon, warning him that once he sees it, he will always want it.
That prophecy proves more than true, as Napoleon's obsession with his wife only increases once they're married. In true femme fatale fashion, Joséphine begins an affair with a younger officer, an affair that seemingly the whole of France learns about before Napoleon does while he's away on a battle campaign. Once informed of this, he deserts the army and rushes back home to confront his wife, who is ambiguously upset: does she truly care for the man she's wronged, or is she only worried about the lifestyle and privilege she stands to lose?
Whatever the case, both Napoleon and Joséphine establish dominance over one another, with each telling the other that "You're nothing without me." Whether out of possessiveness, greed, lust, ambition, or actual true love, it's clear that these two people have become inextricable.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Despite "Napoleon" playing fast and loose with historical facts, one aspect that the film makes abundantly clear is that France, during and post-Revolution, was a country of continual unrest. For people like Napoleon and others, it also meant revolving pockets of opportunity, and one of those pockets comes Bonaparte's way when Sieyes (Julian Rhind-Tutt) approaches him with the idea of enacting a coup d'etat that the latter man believes the French people will accept, given Napoleon's popularity. Ever the tactician desperate for approval, Napoleon plans his own coup within this coup, leading to his rise as First Consul of France.
Napoleon's ambition and grasping for power leads to his being crowned Emperor in 1804, with Joséphine as his Empress. Scott, Scarpa, and Phoenix don't portray this as run-of-the-mill megalomania, however; they view Napoleon as a sort of Type A personality, the kind of person who does all the work on what's supposed to be a group project simply because they know they'll do the best job. Despite these reasons for wanting to ascend to such a level of power and influence within France, the way Napoleon's Emperor looks is disturbingly — or laughingly, as the case may be — similar to the decadent aristocracy Napoleon and the revolutionaries sought to oust.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
Of course, Napoleon didn't reach the heights that he did out of sheer luck. Although Scott, Scarpa, and Phoenix make Bonaparte a man with a slew of embarrassing traits (throwing temper tantrums in public, making strange noises before and during sex with Josephine, and so on), they also make sure to demonstrate his prowess on the battlefield. Much has been made of the Battle of the Pyramids in the film, which depicts Napoleon winning in large part because he dares to fire on the pyramids of Egypt themselves. While yes, this is a fiction (made evident by the fact that, to date, there are no cannon-sized holes in the landmarks), it's a remarkable visual shorthand that indicates just how far and how direct the man was willing to go to achieve victory.
It's not unlike the way Ridley Scott treats filmmaking, either, as both men have no qualms about sidestepping such things as tropes, truth, procedure, and decorum in order to get their way; after all, Scott infamously replaced Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in "All the Money in the World" thoroughly and shockingly fast before its release date.
Having already made that fictional leap with Egypt, Scott depicts the Battle of Austerlitz as Napoleon's grandest triumph, a battle featuring the brilliant maneuver by Napoleon of chasing the Austrian and Russian forces onto a frozen lake, at which point Napoleon's troops shot the ice, causing the enemy to plunge into a watery grave. While again, historically, this maneuver was only brought to bear against a smaller amount of soldiers who were fleeing from battle, its use in the film is a great example of how rule-breaking and direct Napoleon could be — not to mention Scott himself.
Putting on heirs
As Eldon Tyrell says to Roy Batty in Scott's "Blade Runner," "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly." Napoleon, having secured so many victories both personal and professional, was always headed for some kind of downfall, so it's fitting that they arrive on all sides. On the personal front, it seems Joséphine cannot bear him an heir; whether this is a medical issue or something more emotionally metaphysical, Napoleon is influenced by his family and especially his mother, Letizia (Sinéad Cusack), to divorce Joséphine and wed Duchess Marie-Louise (Anna Mawn) to secure France's future.
That future is further in doubt when Napoleon and the French army march on Moscow in 1812, only to find that the city is already abandoned and, later, burned to the ground by the Russians' own hand. Robbed of victory, Napoleon insists on staying in the city to try and save face, only to retreat into a long winter that carves away a large number of his own men. Upon return to France, Napoleon is ousted and exiled to the island of Elba.
Set back but not yet defeated, Napoleon gathers together his supporters and returns to France in the Spring of 1815, retaking his Emperor title. Yet a larger blow has been struck against him by fate, as he discovers that Joséphine has succumbed to pneumonia during his exile. Whether that's merely bad luck, the result of the woman's own loneliness and sadness (in spite of her ex-husband's absence or because of it), or some metaphysical judgment against Napoleon himself, the Emperor is devastated all the same.
Couldn't escape if I wanted to
It seems that no Napoleon story can escape reference or mention of the Battle of Waterloo, for good reason: it's become shorthand for such axioms as the result of hubristic arrogance as well as the inevitability of fate, even death. In everyone's life, in other words, there is a Waterloo.
In the film, Napoleon's defeat seems to blindside both himself and even Arthur Wellesley (Rupert Everett), the Duke of Wellington who appears to have Napoleon's number yet is metaphorically biting his nails during the battle itself. While the movie's Napoleon is certainly foolhardy, arrogant, and blindly ambitious, his loss during the battle seems far more like a genuine mistake rather than something rigidly fated. That is, unless one considers the loss of Joséphine and the prophecy made by the two lovers so many years prior: perhaps one really was nothing without the other, and when separated by death, Napoleon's defeat was written in stone.
Such a romantic notion is offset by Scott's bitterly misanthropic titles that he displays at some point during each battle sequence, statistics that detail the number of dead soldiers (especially Frenchmen). These numbers are tallied at the very end of the film, cruelly reducing any accomplishments Napoleon may have made to the cold, bitter truth: all of this ambition, love, and hope for a better France resulted in not much more than a pile of corpses.
Citizen Plain
Like so many problematic figures of history and fiction, Napoleon (like Marie at the beginning of the film) comes to an ignoble end. Instead of dying a hero or with honor on the battlefield, he's kept alive, still believing he may pull another escape and resurgence until he learns he's being sent to the island of Saint Helena, which is even further and more remote than Elba had been.
Once there, Napoleon is almost literally a haunted man, hearing the voice (or perhaps more) of the deceased Joséphine as he goes about his final days. In a final scene reminiscent of the death of Don Corleone in "The Godfather," he watches two young girls play fight with sticks before making one last attempt at immortality through legend. Claiming that he was the one who burned down Moscow, the girls reveal that they know the actual truth, laughing at Napoleon's attempt at revisionism. With that, Napoleon's defeat is complete, and the man literally sinks out of frame, diminished.
Of course, fading into obscurity is not what's happened to Napoleon in reality; after all, this movie likely wouldn't exist if that were true. Yet Scott's film is both an acknowledgment of history and a knowingly revisionist look at the man, contextualizing Napoleon as someone once great whose impact is both far-reaching and paradoxically nil. As Scott observes in the movie's official press kit, "History's very interesting, because we don't learn from all of our mistakes." The history of humanity, when looked at with as wide a perspective as possible, does seem like a revolving wheel of the same problems, the same issues, the same brief triumphs, and the same devastating mistakes that endlessly follow each other for eternity.
In the end, the only thing one can both take with them and leave behind is affection. For Napoleon, as a title card states, he spent his last breath saying "France ... Army ... Joséphine." For Scott, he ends his film with a seeming dedication to his dog, Lulu: a wry joke or a genuine sentiment? Maybe it's just Scott hammering home his film's theme again, mashing up the tragic with the comedic, like history. Like life.