Ridley Scott’s second French period piece in as many years is a biopic of Napoleon – and a biopic that in many ways aspires to be as grand and bombastic as Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film, which was designed to be projected on three screens simultaneously, and set the standard for all adaptations to follow. Of course, the difference in this case is the casting of Joaquin Phoenix, a diminutive and self-effacing actor, in the role of Napoleon, which has created some consternation amongst viewers who (unlike me) have a detailed knowledge of the history of the period. From more of a layman’s perspective, I thought the unlikely pairing of Napoleon’s swagger with Phoenix’s anti-swagger worked perfectly to capture a historical figure who was somehow both a revolutionary and an emperor at the same time. In the opening scenes, which depict the English blockade of Toulon, Napoleon is introduced as a folk hero, and despite his rise to the highest office in France, his decline and exile keeps him in that revolutionary mode, most memorably when he returns from Elba to meet his old troops. Likewise, when he faces the Duke of Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, at the Battle of Waterloo, all the great monarchical powers are amassed against him, and perceive him as “vermin,” endowing his defeat with an echo of the enduring spirit of the French Revolution.

Against that historical backdrop, Scott’s approach is so imagistic that at times it feels as if we’re watching Napoleon’s subconscious or his self-image before it has completely crystallised. Every scene is embroidered with details, flourishes and textures that not only bring the period to life but capture it as one of transition, albeit a transition so massive that it can only be evoked indirectly through moments of poetic apostrophe. This emergent tone is particularly evident in the battle sequences, especially those of Austerlitz and Waterloo, which aren’t presented as fair accompli, but again as so many emergent manifestations of Napoleon’s military mind, allowing Scott to capture how open-ended and unwritten they must have felt at their inception. For all the brutality of these battles they ultimately play as mercurial emanations of Napoleon’s psyche, whether in the delicate interplay of land, ice and water at Austerlitz or in the skittering cloud cover that turns out to be so critical at Waterloo, where we start to feel a premonition of the World Wars to come, so convulsive is this period.

By contrast, Napoleon is never presented as especially charismatic or remarkable in hand to hand combat. During his first skirmish, on a Toulon garrison, another soldier has to come to his aid. Later, he is totally outnumbered during a revolutionary coup, and has to flee a mob before a flamboyant tracking-shot sees him return to greet the same crowd with paramilitary backup. He is closer to a director than to a fighter, accomplished above all as a coordinator of cannons, which he organises like so many tracking-shots before sitting back to see how it all unfolds: “It is geometry – I simply knew precisely where to place a cannon.” This taste for mise-en-scene culminates with his decision to crown himself as emperor, a moment that Scott explicitly signals as mise-en-scene by invoking Jacques-Louis David’s iconic “The Coronation of Napoleon” and then panning back to display David himself in the process of composing it.

At the same time, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa provides us with a more mercurial evocation of Napoleon’s character as founded above all on the sense of something lacking, a trait that they link to the emperor’s short stature without ever pathologising it or reducing him to it. In one of the most memorable scenes, Scott cuts between Josephine (played by Vanessa Kirby) sleeping with her lover as Napoleon fires on the pyramids during his Egyptian campaign. From this point onwards his obsessive cannonplay feels like a vague phallic surrogate, a way of arming his masculinity against a blockage as material and ethereal as the pyramids themselves. Later in this sequence he stands on tiptoe and then steps onto a crate, to come eye to eye with a mummified pharoah, discerning in its gaze some lineage of greatness of which he is also a part, before placing his hat on top of the sarcophagus and then leaning in, as if listening to the secrets of a bygone era of imperial power. At moments like these, Napoleon seems torn between awareness of his singular destiny and a singular sense of not being fully commensurate to it; it is in that dramatic oscillation that his dynamism lies.

This sense of lack also lends a remarkably tender and poignant quality to his relationship with Josephine, presented here as a friendship as much as a romance. Both parties come to the table with a sense of lacking something – indeed, Napoleon tells his wife that “everyone fights for what they lack.” Napoleon is short in stature and eccentric in his sexual peccadillos, confessing early on that “I’m not built like other men,” while Josephine can’t have children, a big enough issue that Napoleon eventually ends up divorcing her, in the most moving sequence of the film, regretfully informing her that “my destiny is more powerful than my will.” Much as Napoleon himself is exiled first to Elba and then to St. Helena, Josephine experiences a kind of internal exile, relegated to a country house while Napoleon embarks upon a more fruitful marriage, progeny-wise. Combined with the public shaming that occurs around each character (Napoleon for being cuckolded, Josephine for being barren), this evokes a relationship in which exile is always a key consideration – exile from the world’s good opinion, exile from the prospect of progeny and finally, tragically, exile from each other.

The emotional crux of the film thus peaks around two spectacular returns to Josephine, from Egypt and Elba, that bookend the narrative, and yet the final note here is one of melancholy. In a beautifully constructed scene following the defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon and Wellington converse on board a ship whose ceilings are low enough that the Englishman continually hits his head despite repeated warnings but Napoleon is perfectly suited to the cramped conditions, holding forth to a crowd of adoring English children as if the battle was still his to win before complimenting Wellington on the quality of his English breakfast as if he were in charge of the ship and Wellington were the figure heading into exile. At this moment we glimpse a man both entirely attuned with and strangely out of step with his time, great in the slightly oblique and jagged path that he crafted, and destined to be haunted by the scope of what he still could have been once he is finally exiled to St. Helena. And the film ends with a series of small moments that don’t quite cohere into a grand statement – Napoleon talking to children on a beach, shots of tropical plants, a few incidental details of mid-Atlantic life, Napoleon tilting out of the frame and finally a dedication to Lulu, Scott’s dog, who presumably passed away as the film was being composed. Between this self-consciously minor ending and an intertitle that announces Napoleon’s final words as “France, the army, Josephine” lies a remarkably dynamic take on what it means to be a great man of history – to be continually aware of what one’s greatness still lacks, of all the ways it must devolve and decay over time.