Tea at Trianon: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Or Not

From Modern Age:

The year 2023 was a good one for movies, the best in several years at a minimum. All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, May December, Perfect Days, The Boy and the Heron, and The Zone of Interest are all films that are going to stay with me for a long time and will merit re-watching. Numerous other high-profile films from last year took notable artistic risks and deserve serious attention, from mega-hits such as Barbie (which I discussed in the last issue) to commercial disasters such as Beau Is Afraid.

Notwithstanding Scarpa’s declaration, however, not a few high-profile films of 2023 tackled “great man” stories, his own obviously included. Napoleon was among the most audacious of these, daring to encompass the entire life of one of the most significant individuals in the last thousand years of history. It also fell the furthest short of its ambitions—but that was not an unusual failure among last year’s films. With one crucial exception, when filmmakers in 2023 contemplated greatness, they didn’t merely try to temper the audience’s enthusiasm by exposing its limits or its dark side. They left audiences fundamentally perplexed about why the story was being told at all.
It’s probably foolish to draw too many conclusions from a single year’s filmic output. But the casual certitude with which Scarpa made his comment—of course one couldn’t make a movie of a great man’s story these days; everyone knows that—in the context of writing a film about Napoleon of all people, suggested to me that there was something deeper at work than mere coincidence. Filmmakers clearly still relish the opportunity to tell stories on an epic scale, stories about real people, not cartoon superheroes. Have they forgotten how to draw real characters that can fill the frame?

In Scarpa’s interview, he notes that his and Scott’s original plan was for a smaller frame rather than a larger-than-life man.

They wanted to make a film focused on the relationship between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, and I could see the residue of that concept in the finished film. When Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon first sees Josephine (played by Vanessa Kirby), he’s immediately love-struck. It’s an adolescent-feeling moment, and Bonaparte’s love for Josephine has a consistently juvenile quality (he even begs for sex at one point by flapping his gums in a mutely infantile manner). But that childlike quality is not limited to the love plot; this Napoleon seems juvenile throughout the film. I was put in mind of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a man who had been at war since boyhood, who fled to the battlefield to escape the emotionally treacherous world of politics, and who was easily brought to defeat by his mother’s tears. But Coriolanus was never loved by the people. Napoleon was. Yet Phoenix’s Napoleon only once or twice manifests even a hint of the charisma necessary to move a mass of men to risk their lives for his cause. This absence is generally a disaster for the story, but never more so than upon Bonaparte’s return from Elba, when his mere appearance is supposed to be enough for the soldiers charged with apprehending him to switch sides, enlist under Napoleon’s banner, and face terrifying odds in his last stand at Waterloo.

These personal oddities are not the worst problem with the film, though. Napoleon was a world-shaking figure, and as he cut his swathe through history he shattered the civilization around him in ways that are still echoing. Yet there is no sense in the film that there was anything particularly significant about Bonaparte as an individual—as depicted, his extraordinary rise is mostly masterminded by others, with opportunities falling into his lap, and even his military genius seems to consist mostly of recognizing the importance of artillery. Nor does the film suggest anything significant about what he stood for. We don’t learn that he established a new legal structure in Europe, or emancipated the Jews, or prompted the first stirrings of German nationalism, or even that his rise from Corsican commoner to the seat of empire struck a fatal blow to the feudal belief in the natural order of rank. If one leaves all this out, why tell his story at all?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with telling the story of the private life of a great man, showing how that private life more fully explains the public narrative we presumably know better, or even just serving as a counterpoint to the commonly accepted version. But the private Napoleon of this film doesn’t explain the public Napoleon, not even by means of the love story. While Josephine may say that he is nothing without her, there’s no evidence shown on screen that this is the case. All we see is that she is capable of getting him to believe it because of his own immaturity. He still divorces her for reasons of state, of course, because he needs an heir, but that is a motive rooted in the social system that Bonaparte himself did so much to dismantle, an irony in which the film is completely uninterested. (Read more.)