My dad and I can say that the depiction of the battle of Waterloo in Napoleon is inaccurate because we were there.  To be clear, we are not highlanders, or vampires, or some other variety of immortal creature.  Instead, we attended the 200^thanniversary reenactment, which was held on a portion of the same battleground as that fateful day in 1815.  Further, and we are not alone in this (nor in 2015, which garnered a reported crowd of 300,000), what is arguably one of the most pivotal points in history has been well studied by us, separately and together.  If you do not wish to do any reading or internet research, watch Waterloo (1970), or at least read my review of it.  You will get a better sense of the history, either way, by avoiding today’s film, Napoleon.

Though Napoleon says it starts in 1789 with the French Revolution, its real beginning is 1793.  I suppose you cannot have the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) without the toppling of the monarchy, but the movie is already misleading.  We see the young Corsican officer witness the beheading by guillotine of the former queen of France, Marie-Antoinette (Catherine Walker).  Yet, would it not have been more sensible to show the execution of her husband, Louis XVI?  I will attribute this odd decision to showing the complicated relationship Napoleon has with women, but I am getting ahead of myself.  Instead, his real military career begins when revolutionary leader Paul Barras sends Napoleon to Toulon to expel the British from the city.  His success there earns him a promotion to general, and he promises more “brilliant successes.”  Until then, he begins to mingle with Parisian society.  Doing so brings him into contact with the former aristocrat by marriage Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), who has recently been released from prison once the bloodier phase of the French Revolution, known as “The Terror,” ends.  They first meet at a ball celebrating this occasion, and his staring attracts her attention.  Yet, for some reason, he chooses not to make introductions at this time.  To force the issue, she later sends her son from her previous marriage (her spouse had been guillotined) to ask that Napoleon to return her late husband’s sword.  He does so, and thus commences a relationship that is strange by cinematic standards, but sort of accurate historically speaking.  Napoleon is portrayed as being powerless to her womanly wiles, which make him jealous beyond all reason.  To this end, he abandons his campaign in Egypt when he gets word of her infidelities early in their marriage.  Upon his return, they have what appears to be a days’ long row, one in which they each admit to cheating on the other, but ending when they make a sort of pact that they need one another.  Back in France, Napoleon is on hand to witness the end of the short-lived French Republic, a process precipitated by him being named First Consul of France.  By the way, he gave the country the Code Napoléon, a system of laws, many of which are still in effect to this day . . . and of which you do not get a single whisper about in the entire run time.  Yet, because he is viewed as an upstart by the rest of Europe (for some reason, in the context of the movie), one of his top diplomats, Talleyrand (Paul Rhy), recommends that Napoleon be crowned ruler of France.  Still, not even this attempt to join the monarchy club assuages the other European rulers, like Francis I (Miles Jupp), emperor of Austria.  This leads to more wars, and we see this play out at the battle of Austerlitz in 1805, a tremendous French victory.  With Austria cowed, Napoleon turns his attention to Russia, getting Emperor Alexander I (Édouard Philipponnat) to sign the Treaty of Tilsit.  This document is to curtail France’s biggest enemy, Great Britain, from influencing Europe, though you would not know this until the end of the film.  Underlying Napoleon’s attempts to legitimize his rule is the apparent barrenness of Joséphine.  Namely, he needs an heir to his throne to ensure his succession, but she proves unable to conceive.  At one point, Napoleon’s mother arranges for her son to sleep with another woman to prove the problem of pregnancy is not his.  When their copulation results in conception, it is grounds for Napoleon to divorce Joséphine.  This is done tearfully, and with promises that they will remain friends, which they awkwardly do.  In yet another attempt to secure his position, Napoleon marries the Austrian princess, Marie-Louise (Anna Mawn), who seemingly immediately bears him a son.  Then Napoleon has to make it weird again by taking the child to visit Joséphine, though this apparently did happen in real life.  Whatever peace resulted from this arrangement is dashed when the Russians break the terms of their treaty with France.  In response, Napoleon musters a massive army and invades.  He makes it to Moscow, but the Russians burn their capital and he is forced to retreat into the unforgiving Russian winter.  There is then a massive time jump ahead to when, roughly due to his failures in East Europe, he is forced to abdicate and sent to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.  He spends a few months ruling the tiny nation until, yet again, Joséphine’s seeming infidelities, this time with Emperor Alexander I, prompt Napoleon to return to France.  Unfortunately, she dies before they can meet.  Instead, he goes on to fight the battle of Waterloo against Great Britain and loses.  After his defeat, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett), informs Napoleon that the would-be ruler of France is going into permanent exile on St. Helena, an island in the Atlantic Ocean.  There are a few scenes of him here, living out the last of his days before the movie comes to a merciful end.

While there were parts of Napoleon that felt off throughout, by the time it gets to Waterloo I was actually booing.  Please forgive me, but I am going to go on a little history rant.  Napoleon is one of the most famous historical figures of all time.  Even today, most probably recognize the name, even if they know nothing about the actual man.  Because of this, I am not sure how or why we cannot do his past correctly on film.  A life such as our main character led, I would think, would all but write itself given the verifiably true twists and turns it took.  All the same, I could have given the movie a pass had they correctly portrayed the climactic moment of Napoleon’s career, that being Waterloo.  They do not have to go through every detail of the battle, particularly since it is not the focus of the entire run time.  However, there are some key elements that an untrained eye can miss, but are glaringly obvious if you know that at which you are looking.  Namely, director Ridley Scott, who I thought would have known better, decided to depict each army as entrenching.  Further, the British side lacks the presence of the famous Hougomont and La Haye Sainte farms, which were key aspects of the British position.  The fact that these features are not there is puzzling.  With the trenches, which look like they had been dug by machinery, the filmmakers are putting in more work to get the events wrong.  Neither side had the time for such impromptu field fortifications, besides them being historically inaccurate.  With the farms, especially since the battle was filmed on grassy English land, you would think this would be easy enough to insert.  With today’s technology, how hard could it have been to add in a couple of digital barns to the landscape?  I do not understand why such things were left out.

On top of Napoleon’s frustrating historical inaccuracies, there was not much for this Catholic reviewer to discuss.  Thus, I will have to resort to giving you some further context to the movie by telling you what the film does not show.  Actually, there is a brief moment depicting what I am going to talk about, and that is when you see a nun being released from prison at the same time as Joséphine.  This speaks to how the French Revolutionary government severely restricted the activity of the Catholic Church.  From a certain, narrow point of view, this makes sense given the way French society functioned before the Revolution.  Organized into “estates,” there were three and the clergy were at the top of this social order, at least on paper.  In practice, the monarchy took the lion’s share of the country’s resources, though the Church was not far behind in what it was given.  The mobs kicked off a fairly thorough dismantling of Catholicism’s influence on France, which is remarkable since this is the same country where the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus at the time of His Passion.  For a time, they even did away with the traditional, Church-founded calendar, inventing their own names fom the years, days, months.  As for what you do see, while the movie correctly shows Napoleon crowning himself before the Roman prelate, this is a momentary lull in an otherwise antagonist and hostile attitude towards Rome.  Another aspect not pictured is how our title character attempted to make amends with the Church late in life, even asking for Mass to be said for him as a dying wish.

What impact these gestures had on Napoleon’s soul, only God knows.  What I know is that I was left disappointed by this much-anticipated-film, especially by this life-long history nerd and somebody who has specifically studied the title character over the years.  Again, if you want a good film about this period, watch Waterloo, not Napoleon.