For critics, Napoleon is more Trafalgar than Austerlitz

Ridley Scott is back in theaters with a 28th feature film. After Christopher Columbus (1492, 1992), Emperor Commodus (Gladiator, 2000) and Moses (Exodus: Gods and Kings, 2014), the 85-year-old director tackles a new historical figure with Napoleon. Despite an attractive cast, with Joaquin Phoenix in the emperor's costume, Vanessa Kirby in the role of Joséphine de Beauharnais and the presence of a few French actors like Tahar Rahim or Ludivine Sagnier, this biopic with the air of a romantic drama is far from having convinced the critics in France.

For Le Figaro it’s the “dreary plain”. This new feature film by the British filmmaker “could have been called Napoleon and Joséphine”, writes Étienne Sorin, as the character played by Vanessa Kirby is central in the film. Napoleon is nothing other than a "monolithic and boorish emperor", "a sentimental brute" and worse still, "an insatiable conqueror without vision", like Ridley Scott "whose fresco on one of the most controversial figures in French history leaves one strangely indifferent. And even if the battle scenes are “spectacular”, the politics “are delivered in ellipses”. “Too little” therefore, “to make it the definitive biopic on the emperor”.

In the columns of Télérama, Jacques Morice does not seem won over by this Napoleon, which he judges to be a “crazy biopic” where the battles are “pretty much the only thing worth saving”. Between the historical “inaccuracies”, the omnipresence of the character of Joséphine de Beauharnais, like “a fantasy projected by Napoleon” or a Joaquin Phoenix, “frozen in his role” and in whom “it is impossible to see Napoleon”, this film “is an aberration.”

Same observation in the critique of Libération which sees in Napoléon “a quietly indecent film”. Olivier Lamm, very critical of a biopic which “offers no point of view, neither on the man, nor on the myth” and instead highlights “the pride and misanthropy of its filmmaker” . A disappointment which leads to regret, that of the time of The Duellists (1977), Ridley Scott's first feature film and a true masterpiece of the British's cinema, which has become "grotesque".

For Le Monde, Ridley Scott “had difficulty getting to grips with his hero”. Jacques Mandelbaum regrets a Napoleon of “relative poverty” and whose portrait offers a “feminist rereading of imperial destiny” as “the vagaries of his marital condition” dictate his career.

Renaud Baronian from Le Parisien is a little more lenient with Ridley Scott's latest feature film. Even if he judges it to be “too short” (despite the 2h39 projection) and too “British” to depict “the key periods of the Emperor's life”, he believes that the film “is not bad for as much” Renaud Baronian underlines “phenomenal battle scenes” which make us “cling to our seats”. He also slips in some heartfelt praise for the actors in the feature film. An “impressively serious” Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby “always excellent” and the fabulous interpretation of the character of Paul Barras by Rupert Everett which “alone is worth seeing the film”.

On the other side of the Channel, the reviews are much more laudatory. The Telegraph speaks of an “ideal work” if the latter were to mark the end of the career of the 85-year-old director. Robbie Collin even manages to find good in Joaquin Phoenix's “soft, undissipated Californian accent,” which reinforces the idea that Napoleon “was never really able to slip into the costume that fate had chosen for him.” In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw visibly loved the performance of the Californian actor, who delivers a performance “as robust as the glass of Burgundy that he drinks in large gulps”.