HERE COMES TROUBLE

“Napoleon” and Monster.”

- ANTHONY LANE

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.