Charging in Without a Plan

In Ridley Scott's Napoleon, a clown claims the crown.

- ALISON WILLMORE

ALL OF Napoleon's best moments are about how the brilliant military commander at its focus is a buffoon. The Napoleon Bonaparte of the film, played by Joaquin Phoenix, dozes off with his eyes open while Directory head Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim) tries to talk to him about a matter of political urgency. When Napoleon's gestures at peacemaking are brushed off by a British ambassador, he yelps back, "You think you're so great because you have boats!" Presented with a mummy while on a campaign in Egypt, he climbs onto a crate to get as close as possible to its desiccated face, as though expecting it to whisper advice in his ear. And during a fight with his wife, Joséphine (a wonderfully bemused Vanessa Kirby, who facilitates what have to be the year's most indifferent sex scenes), over her failure to conceive, he describes the changes in his own body by declaring his appetites to be a matter of providence: "Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!" Phoenix is, at five-foot-eight, slightly taller than the man famously portrayed as diminutive, and he is, at 49, disorientingly mature to be playing someone who's around 24 when the film begins, but he is unfalteringly weird in a way that is its own reward.