The new movie from Ridley Scott, "Napoleon," with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, runs for two hours and thirty-eight minutes. That's almost as long as Napoleon's coronation, at Notre-Dame de Paris, in 1804. The ceremony began at midday and lasted at least three hours. The congregation snacked on chocolate, sausages, and bread: the popcorn of the revolutionary age.
In "Napoleon," we attend the coronation, but only for a while. Scott is in a hurry to move on to the next event.
As in any account of Napoleon's life, there is an underlying comedy in the very attempt to squash an unruly mob of incidents into a tight dramatic space.
"Would you like to see the bedroom?" Napoleon says to his second wife, Marie-Louise (Anna Mawn), and bang: a baby, brought in swaddling clothes for him to dandle. That was quick. At the destructive end of existence, Scott is no less economical. There may be battle scenes to die for-Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino, and Waterloo, plus a dusty glimpse of combat beside the Pyramids but entire campaigns, elsewhere, are elided or brushed off in a line of dialogue. "I have already conquered Italy, which surrendered without conflict," Napoleon declares. Tell that to the folk of Binasco, in Lombardy, who rose up against the French, in 1796, and were punished for their temerity. "Having killed a hundred people, we burned down the village, a terrible but efficacious example," Napoleon wrote.
Esta historia es de la edición December 04, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición December 04, 2023 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.