A&E's "Napoleon" a limp disappointment

In times like this, it’s good to think of Napoleon Bonaparte or, as I like to call him, Nabulion Buonaparte, the Italian name on his birth certificate. Corsican by birth, the French emperor patented many of the 20th century’s worst evils total war, secret police forces, mass propaganda, cultic reverence for a secular autocrat, concentration of power in the central government. Indeed, it’s not a large stretch to say that Saddam Hussein is a child of Napoleon. Can you blame the French for taking a certain paternal pride in his development?
Even though the continent Napoleon roiled for 20 years is lurching toward a new, interdependent alliance, the seeds of Bonapartism have spread all over the globe. So it was with piqued interest that I watched A&E’s “Napoleon,” a four-hour movie airing Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8.
As civilized nations duel with a barbaric tyrant in the Middle East, what better time to examine Napoleon’s legacy, his tactics, motives and fatal flaws?
Alas, “Napoleon,” directed by Yves Simoneau, is a limp soap opera that often seems better suited to Lifetime Television for Women.
In an effort to make the great dictator seem more human, it dwells tediously on his tangled love life: his uneasy marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais (Isabella Rossellini), his affair with Polish mistress Maria Walewska and his politically motivated marriage to Marie Louise of Austria.
As played by Christian Clavier, Napoleon is a sort of lovesick Casanova who has little use for politics and government, claiming, to the bafflement of France’s chief diplomat, Talleyrand (John Malkovich), that he is more interested in the humane pursuits of math and science.
Napoleon as Cincinnatus now there’s a novel concept. “Napoleon,” however, makes no effort to explain why the young general became so ruthlessly ambitious. In what seems little more than a random chain of events, he just assumes power and sets about his storied military campaigns and conquests.
When it’s not painfully stalled in the stuffy palace apartments and salons in Paris, “Napoleon” is a whiplashing narrative rush. It follows the emperor as he crisscrosses the European continent, bouncing from Spain to Austria to Poland to Germany to Russia but takes no breathers for analysis or contexualization.
Amid the movie’s hasty whirl, we’re shown throwaway battle sequences that could have taken place anywhere; there’s never any sense of topography, with the exception of a brief depiction of the pyramids during Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition this despite the fact that Mr. Simoneau filmed on location across the European continent.
Another glitch in “Napoleon” is that with the sole exception of Mr. Malkovich’s Talleyrand, the emperor’s inner circle is fuzzily identified. It’s almost impossible to tell, for example, what role Gerard Depardieu’s Fouche (Napoleon’s chief of police) plays in all the court intrigue. He makes a lot of mean and menacing faces but other than that doesn’t seem to do anything much.
The same goes for the rest of Napoleon’s coterie as well as his foreign rivals: I recommend keeping a biographical dictionary close by because names are dropped in muddy French accents haphazardly throughout the entire movie.
“Napoleon” does one thing consistently well: sensuality. Its women, overflowing with tight-bodice cleavage, look as if they could bedevil the most hardhearted of tyrants. With Miss Rossellini as Josephine, it’s easy to see why Napoleon kept returning to the arms of his philandering wife.
It’s a shame Mr. Simoneau, who otherwise skipped lightly through his subject’s biographical highlights, got so hung up on Napoleon’s romantic anguish.
If he wanted to explore the human side of Napoleon, why not burrow into the deeper questions of his Corsican identity how he repudiated his Italian roots? How many people know the emperor had to learn French as a second language?
Napoleon, like Adolf Hitler (an Austrian) and Josef Stalin (a Georgian), ruled a nation to which he didn’t belong from birth, but you never get a hint of that outsider status from “Napoleon.”
Those already familiar with Napoleon’s legacy won’t come away from A&E’s treatment having learned anything new. Worse, the viewer who knows nothing of Napoleon will learn only that he was a general who ruled France some while ago.
Napoleon was much more than that, of course. He’s one of the most significant figures of human history.
He can’t or at least shouldn’t be reduced to the stuff of romance novels.

**
WHAT: “Napoleon”
WHEN: Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8 p.m.
WHERE: A&E