Biopics have been a cornerstone of Hollywood success for over 100 years. Nothing draws a crowd like the depiction of a known character, and nothing draws an Oscar-aspiring actor like the challenge of playing said character. There’s something existentially comforting about seeing the messy annals of history contained into a neatly assembled narrative and gift-bowed with an inspirational takeaway. A string of new biopics have appeared this year, from Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer to Ben Affleck’s Air, highlighting how the genre remains a popular avenue for big-name directors with the budget to spare. Last month we added to that list Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s bid to capture the magic of the historical epic. Sadly, reviews have been mixed. In light of my own dissatisfactions with the film, I want to pinpoint a few considerations that can make or break a successful biopic and examine how Napoleon fails in each.

There is no single way to write a biopic, just as there is no single way to write a film. But with the biopic, the question of inclusion is pressing. Which are the important details of a person’s life? What should be ignored and what should be spotlighted? Whose point of view prioritised? It was a political decision to frame The Darkest Hour around Churchill’s heroism while ignoring his own darkest atrocities. Likewise, the celebratory Straight Outta Compton G-walked blindly past Dr Dre’s violent history with women, a glaring absence given Dre’s involvement in the film’s writing and production.

If biopics cannot include everything, where should their focus lie? A loose distinction can be made between two types of biopic: the ‘microcosmic’ and the ‘panoramic’. The microcosmic biopic takes a key conflict in a character’s life and frames  the narrative around it. Take Lincoln trying to pass the 13^th Amendment in Lincoln or King George VI overcoming his speech impediment in The King’s Speech. As a unifying device, the microcosm allows the director to piece the story out from a focussed aspect of their subject’s life. The inverse of this, the panoramic biopic, takes on more scope and seeks, often in far greater runtime, to explore multiple moments in a life. Think the classic epics, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, which tend more towards linearity and grandiose scale.

As with all art, rules are created to be discarded. Add to this distinction what can be termed ‘Hybrid’ biopics – a merging of the panoramic with the microcosmic to show a whole genesis through the lens of a single moment. Examples include this year’s Oppenheimer, which sped montage-like through years of the scientist’s life to focus pointedly on the Manhattan Project and its aftershocks, or The Social Network, recounting the story of Facebook through the centralising question of the company’s ownership.

Whichever structure is chosen, no biopic can avoid the problem of sectioning off historical fact into storytelling format. History and narrative are distinct, a tension underlying the whole genre. The best biopics may not be reliable historical artifacts, because in their alterations they make for wonderful stories. Napoleon, unfortunately, achieves neither storytelling triumph nor historical reliability. It interprets events loosely and embellishes for spectacle, yet the narrative ambles forward with no greater benefit to cohesion. Napoleon crams thirty of some of France’s most tumultuous years into such a small space of time that it resembles a highlight reel. It is linear to a point of fault, panorama where nuance is lost. We are treated to everything, and as a result get very little of anything.

I imagine a different film, one more along the lines of the hybrid structure. It starts on Elba, Napoleon bored and alone and longing for France. His rise to power is drawn out through character exposition, maybe a few flashbacks – the glory of Austerlitz, the tragedy of Moscow. The narrative arc is his journey north and rerise to power, climaxing in the bitter pains of an extended Waterloo. The denouement comes with Napoleon sitting now on St Helena, further from France, further from power, embedding the circularity of his journey, and by extension the futility of power lust more generally. Space would be reserved for drawing out his inner motivations. There would be time to build Waterloo up as a meaningful climax rather than one more in a sequence of extended battles. Instead, Elba is barely explored. No time to experience the boredom. No time to witness the desperation. It is a fleeting scene that exemplifies the whole film, a blunt retelling of what roughly happened with no extended invitation to think or feel anything about it.

The truth is that Napoleon does not know how to handle its main character. Ridley Scott wants to keep his protagonist at arm’s length and so contradicts the terms of his own character study. He ironically belittles the man but skims the surface of his technical or charismatic brilliance. Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t seem convinced either; indeed, he sometimes seems bored. The petulance of the Corsican is foregrounded but rarely contrasted with a more imposing will to power. We get little sense of the inner drive that led Napoleon to rule, birthed as it was by personal insecurities about his poor French and peripheral origins.

No biopic should shun criticality, but Scott goes too far in this direction. Napoleon does not allow depth to its protagonist. Whether hero or anti-hero, the biopic cannot avoid depth, or it will fail. As Dennis Bingham, author of the book Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre, states “the biopic is by no means a simple recounting of the facts of someone’s life. It is an attempt to discover biographical truth.” (pg.7) But Napoleon is mostly the former – a straightforward retelling with few opportunities for meaningful exploration. By the film’s end we have been treated to some unquestionably thrilling battle scenes but have learned nothing more significant about the actual man. Scott begins the film with his opinion of Napoleon intact and does not allow the audience to explore one for themselves. For a genre grounded in at least the illusion of objective fact, this is unpardonable.

In short, Napoleon suffers from the problem of giving too much in too little, such that by the end it is difficult to really care. No meaningful time has been spent getting to know the main character. Perhaps the 4-hour director’s cut will improve this, but as it stands the film does not treat its subject with the necessary depth a biopic requires. Instead, we are presented with a shallow interpretation of one of history’s most famous figures. Love him or loathe him (and don’t trust anyone who loves him too much), Napoleon was a fascinating and unique historical case study. That such an intriguing figure could appear boring on the big screen is a testament to the shortcomings of this film.

Sources

Dennis Bigham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (London: Rutgers University Press, 2010).