David Bennett

Napoleon: Film Review

I would love to have been a fly on the wall for this one. Joaquin Phoenix effectively played the Joker part again in frozen stillness, only coming alive when he was playing the tactician of battles or rushing into the fray wild eyed and mad like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine has zero chemistry and she looked permanently surprised.

How did Ridley Scott not see that they were not a good match for the screen? How could he have portrayed them as such broken cardboard figures? Was he intending to show what a mismatched sham their relationship was? Is Napoleon intended as a cautionary tale? Maybe, but it wasn’t woven like that.

To the point, and the point at which the film and I properly parted company was when Napoleon is in Egypt on campaign (as you do) and is told that his Josephine has a lover. He returns home and is accused of deserting his campaign. He, seemingly outraged, counter-accuses his accusers of deserting the governance of France. In a stand-off he runs off, gathers troops (who are of course loyal to him) and fights back and turns the tables.

When his accusers in the Parliament corner him, he transitions from powerful to ‘oops’ in flash, and he reminded me of the Joker again – same mannerisms.

Leaving that to one side, the plot describes how if Josephine had not had a lover then Napoleon would not have returned from Egypt and the consuls could have continued to merrily run France into the ground.

It may have been so as historical fact, but as a presentation of storytelling it was weak.

So, the plot: Napoleon takes over France under the guise of ending the Terror and has lots of battles that meld into one. He bites off more than he chan chew when the Russians have the temerity to burn Moscow to deny the city to the French and to save the Russian army. And to cap it all they refuse to come to peace terms despite Napoleon waiting weeks for the surrender.

By then the Russian winter is approaching and at that point Napoleon goes north to St Petersburg, against the advice of his generals. That will be his undoing in Russia and when he returns to France.

The Russians beat the French in the battles of Tarutino and Maloyaroslavets, but neither is mentioned. We see that the winter forces him to retreat in defeat, but we see nothing of that horror.

Half of Napoleon’s army died in that retreat and we know the details of the frozen bodies on the road because it is all in the contemporary account, The Memoirs of Sergeant Burgoyne.

It is important to know because the survivors who retreated with Napoleon supported him again after the exile on Elba. Why was that? Was he a populist whom they preferred to the alternative? None of that is explained. And it should have been because it is important in understanding France of the period. This Boy’s Own version doesn’t give us an explanation.

Napoleon is exiled because of his defeat in Russia, so much is fact.

When he sails from Elba after less than a year in exile, his motley band of followers march with him. They meet the opposing forces and in one quick speech those opposing him change sides and join him. Just like that. And they march on Paris. Again – it might have been like that historically, but the way it was presented was a Monty Python version.

Then comes Waterloo.

I held my breath fearing that Rupert Everett as Wellington would not be able to hold a serious glance – but he did and he was great.

I came away thinking that so much money and time was spent on the reconstruction of the battles that there was no time to tell the story properly.

We hear Napoleon say that he wants to bring about universal peace. He fought everyone to bring that about. But countries changed sides. Allies became enemies and vice versa. Kings and emperors admired him, forged alliances with him and then betrayed him and defeated him.

Perhaps the message of the film was in there.

At the end of the film there was a tally of the dead:

He led 61 battles in his military career…
TOULON 6,000 dead
MARENGO 12,000 dead
AUSTERLITZ 16,500 dead
BORODINO 71,000 dead
WATERLOO 47,000 dead (one day)
INVASION OF RUSSIA 460,000 dead
1793-1815: over 3,000,000 dead

So what do we learn? That Napoleon was successful for a while but in the end he bit off more than he could chew. And in pursuit of his dream of peace under his banner he brought about the death of millions. Ah, we have been here before and again since then. When will we learn?

Killers Of The Flower Moon: Film Review

It starts with the burial ceremony for the sacred pipe as the Osage tribe realise their ways will not be followed by their children. And then a cute segue into the burial unearthing black gold and suddenly the Osage are the rich dudes enjoying everything the turn-of-the-century 1920s could bring.

And then there is a great slow pace development that places the central male character as a solder returning from the war, and the romance between the two lead characters – he and an Osage woman. Then it was ugly violence and I kept thinking that if it was not tinged by the romantic portrayal of the Osage Indians then would just be a gangsters versus civilians, and not much of a film for that. So, great potential but turned floppy.

The Taste Of Things: Film Review

Ostensibly the film is about food and the preparation of food and how people get on with each other while preparing food.

But I don’t think that’s what the film is actually about.

An important character in the film dies part way through and another important character mourns the loss.

And now take a step back and ask – how does a filmmaker or an author show the depth of the relationship that existed for which the loss is now felt, the loss of the wonder of the other person?

So I think that the concentration on the cooking of food, the technicalities of making food, the technicalities which showed the characters and skills and attention to detail – all of these were outward manifestations of relationship.

Long protestations of love are in the end just protestations, but the ballet of their movements together shows something deeper.

I don’t know if it’s a novel way, but it’s a clever way of showing the dual experience of the everyday and a more subtle experience. The everyday experience of cooking something that’s essential to life, and the higher experience of joining with someone. Through that we can feel that the relationship is deep, founded on solid ground, and meaningful. So we can believe the loss is real.

There was another thread, which was that the food preparation was very real. We see them pull the guts out of a fish, and then out of a chicken. We see them scald the skin off the blackened feet of the chicken and scrape the skin off a sole or turbot. No neatly presented packages of food from the supermarket, because the film was set at about the turn of the 20th century and mass produced food was far off into the future.

So we get to look into a more raw, more real, more elemental past and to be wistful about what we have lost in the modern world. I think that’s what the film was about. It was about loss.

Black Atlantic

The Black Atlantic exhibition is just ending at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge UK.

It’s a kind of a mea culpa for the slave trade because a slave owner gave Cambridge University the money to build the museum. He made his money from pineapples in the Caribbean, and used slave labour to run his business.

Twelve and a half million people were transported to the New World to make money for the European entrepreneurs, often with State backing and with scientific connivance concluding that Blacks were lower in brainpower, and less human.

Ten million seven hundred thousand arrived, so almost two million died on the way.

One exhibit that caught my eye was a punch bowl from the 1760s with a motif proclaiming ‘Success to the Africa Trade’, and celebrating the voyages of George Dickinson. He made five voyages on three ships, between 1763 and 1768, transporting a total of 725 captives across the Atlantic: 97 died.

I am going to assume the numbers are typical for all voyages. In that case 725 divided by five voyages is 145 slaves.

Twelve and a half million slaves at 145 per voyage equates to over 82,000 voyages.

After Seeing The Exhibition

I wanted to resist tutt-tutting at the terrible deeds. I had to work to keep my own feelings and not be swept along with the tide of feelings that are kind of expected in a mea culpa exhibition.

So many stories, so many strands.

How should we feel? How should dyed-in-the-wool white English people feel? Many of them will have great grandparents who lived miserable toil-filled lives. They too have their stories.

In a place like Cambridge there will be more than a sprinkling of people who come from privileged families. Perhaps they will feel uncomfortable? Should they feel more uncomfortable than the poor? People from poor backgrounds might feel they are off the hook. 

The truth is that if the profits were kept by the wealthy, they didn’t conduct the slave trade all by themselves. There would have been people from every class without whom the system would have ground to a halt.

How quickly did the racial stereotypes filter into the way everybody from the top to the bottom felt about Black people? 

And today should ‘we’ be making amends? And how? Even if exhibitions raise awareness, they don’t pay the bills of the descendants of those who were enslaved.

And if, as it was, that the whole system was driven by money, then should ‘we’ pay money back, aand if so then how much? Europe took off like a rocket on the back of the profits from the slave trade.

What about all the compounded benefits? Should there be a discount because the world would not be in the happy place it is without the initial capital that drove technological advances in which everyone can now share?

And who is ‘we’? Aren’t we all the same – give anyone any excuse and wouldn’t we do the same? Or would we? Not now, today of course, but under the influence of the environment prevailing then. Of course we would not be cruel, but that seems a poor excuse for turning human beings into energy sources against their will.

And what about those intermediaries, the North African traders, the tribe-on-tribe enslavement? How would we allocate responsibility?

Maybe we have moved on.

Of course, no one would think it right to own slaves today. But if the environment changed? If enough people thought it was OK? Would we be drawn along. Would you? Would I? Is it absolutely clear that we do not want to go backwards?

In the short term you couldn’t argue that the world is moving from bad to good. Maybe in the longer term you could say we are moving that way.

The big question is what moves us that way. A friend thinks that it’s the natural outcome of rubbing along together that we eventually see that being nice is a better way to be. It doesn’t answer every question because if life itself is just a chance outcome of bouncing molecules, then sooner or later some people are going to want a bigger answer.