Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and Tolstoy's

"Scott’s omissions are more mindless than driven by any desire to provide an easy portrait of unmitigated greatness."

Earlier this month I was in Bali, Indonesia for a short holiday. On the return flight to Delhi, I picked Ridley Scott's Napoleon from the in-flight entertainment assortment. Why? Because of my running status of being a serious War & Peace reader¹. The bulk of Tolstoy’s bulky novel is set between Napoleon's war with Russia and Austria in 1805 (culminating in a Russo-Austrian defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz) and his invasion of Russia in 1812 (with a pyrrhic French victory at the Battle of Borodino, before Russians adopted the scorched-earth² policy with Moscow and gave Napoleon a mega brain-freeze). Napoleon is a character in War & Peace.

Like taste and smell, I think one’s critical faculties are also blunted during flights. I have never disliked a movie that I watched while flying. I liked Napoleon too. It presented historical events in a decent, highlights-reel sort of package. I presume it is difficult to go any other way with Napoleon. There’s just so much that happened to that man and through that man and by that man. As to the man himself, the one angle that was most used in Scott’s treatment was Napoleon’s relationship with his wife Joséphine.

On consideration now, I realise I would have liked many more things to be included, or the treatment to be wider in general. During Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, eg., it might have been (academically) satisfying to see at least one illustration of what Edward Said named Orientalism: the West’s self-serving misreading of the East, so to speak. I say this because Said’s book gives a lot of importance to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt: it begins with it. Instead, during an odd scene in which Napoleon approaches a pharaoh’s mummy inside an opened tomb, we see a black army officer among the posse in the background. I do not know whether this was a possibility in 1799, but to my private hope of seeing some orientalist gesture, it did give the alternate of the balm of irony. Scott gives no thought to giving us anything substantial from Napoleon’s impressions of the East, or to the war crimes he committed in Jaffa, Palestine, where he sanctioned two days and two nights of slaughter, pillage and rape. Interestingly, Tolstoy has a character in War & Peace reminding an audience of Napoleon’s crimes in Jaffa. That’s plus 1 to Tolstoy.

Scott’s omissions are, however, more mindless than driven by any desire to provide an easy portrait of unmitigated greatness. In the movie, Napoleon abandons his Egyptian campaign upon receiving news of Joséphine’s adultery and returns to France. Over a dusk-to-dawn conversation, the couple arrive at an uneasy equilibrium, with Napoleon shown to be as desperate for the woman’s affections as he’s desirous of muting the scandal. Subsequently, we get many scenes in which the man’s pique and petulance and pettiness, which run parallel to any greatness or genius he possessed, are on display. These scenes might have surprised a viewer looking for relentless statesmanship and emperor-like behaviour and glory-seeking in battle (Scott’s the one who gave us Gladiator), but these did not surprise me, for I had already seen Tolstoy paint a similar picture of the Corsican. Tolstoy’s Napoleon is vain, jumpy, and not all too considerate about whom he bestows with honours or rewards. Tolstoy’s Napoleon is not likeable in the least.

Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine, a central theme of Scott’s movie, plays no role in the Tolstoy novel. But that is in no way significant. Had Tolstoy been writing a novel with Napoleon at the centre, the relationship would certainly have had its full place. I say this with confidence because of a familiarity with how Tolstoy viewed History—as a continuity with no clear agents and events, and therefore one whose so-called big events are often sourced from myriad accidents and intents, the small linked to the small linked to the small, and so on, with no care or conviction for the big. Joséphine, insofar as she shall be seen as a small part of a great man’s narrative, would have, for that very reason, interested Tolstoy immensely.

The Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, the acme of Napoleon’s military genius, gave Scott ample room to go full Hollywood and show Napoleon conducting all the movements from a hill of sorts. Later, French victory nearly guaranteed, we get shots of Russian and Austrian cavalrymen scampering on ice that is being punctured by cannonballs, only to get under, cavalryman blood and horse blood streaking the sordid turbulence of the water in slow-mo shots. Tolstoy, who described the battle from the other side, ie., the point of view of his Russian characters, had a similar scene, where fleeing soldiers trying to cross a bridge over a frozen lake are petrified by the incessant cannon fire and abandon the bridge for the ice. As for the overall fiasco, Tolstoy holds himself from mentioning Napoleon’s cleverness as the cause and seems interested, instead, in the careerist struggles and cultural distances between the Russian and Austrian generals, something that he illustrates superbly in a war-council meeting on the eve of the battle, where the main Russian general, Kutuzov, just goes to sleep!

I’m now interested in Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 film Waterloo, named after Napoleon’s final battle. It is available on YouTube for free! After the loss at Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa³. This becomes the end of his journey. In watching the relevant sections in Scott’s film, one doesn’t get a full feeling of the character’s feeling of loss, or even the coming to terms with that loss⁴. I wonder if Bondarchuk had done better five decades back.

Anyway, here’s Nikita and me at Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali:

1. I’m more than midway into the book, which I’m reading as part of a chapter-a-day readalong conducted by Simon Haisell.

2. Leave the city and burn the city, so that the enemy doesn’t profit from capturing it. Hitler, apparently, wanted to do the same with Paris when the Allied forces advanced. It is said that his Minister of Arms (and chief architect) Albert Speer received the order and failed to execute it out of his love for the city’s architecture, or his love for the Eiffel Tower, or some other such sentimental thing. I haven’t verified any of this, so believe it at your own risk.

3. Amitav Ghosh, in his novel River of Smoke, shows a character visiting Napoleon in St. Helena.

4. This is an odd thing to seek, I agree. Millions died because of that man, who is called the Antichrist in the early parts of War and Peace.