You might suppose that those who believe that America is colonizing French culture would find a French word around which to organize their disdain, but they don’t. Almost all French commentators italicize the ambiguities of Napoleon’s historical role-was he the reincarnation of Alexander the Great or the sinister precursor of Hitler? Perhaps the sole exception is the far-right polemicist and onetime Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who contributed a laudatory story to the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles with the cover line “L’empereur anti-woke.” “Woke” has become, however improbably, an omnipresent borrowed word in French polemics, particularly on the anti-American far right. This oddity has not been missed in the French reception to the film. The cast of his character remains the cast of his character, which, in classic movie-star manner, Phoenix adjusts but does not significantly vary from role to role he is no Lon Chaney, nor nearly an Olivier, inventing a new face and voice for each role. Though Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon, for the most part ably, in Ridley Scott’s much talked-of new movie of the Emperor’s life and battles, it’s still disconcerting that he says his lines not only in English but more or less with exactly the same accents-and using exactly the same slightly paralyzed set of expressions-with which he inhabited Johnny Cash. Yet, when one has something, if no more than a big toe, resting in another culture, the oddity resonates. It’s why we love Laurence Olivier’s Shylock, or, for that matter, Russell Crowe’s gladiator. Indeed, the whole point and rationale-the raison d’être, as we say in English-of the theatrical arts is to extend our circles of compassion through acts of creative empathy: we want people who are unlike the characters they play to inhabit them so that in acts of sympathetic resonance we too expand ourselves. Fiction is the premise of all fictions, and that simple truth, along with the (perhaps declining) companion truth that, for the most part, movie stars are made in America, is enough to explain the phenomenon. Charlton Heston was the Spanish El Cid and the Hebrew Egyptian Moses and the Judean Ben-Hur-believe it or not, he won an Oscar for that one-and his Midwestern accents were taken for granted whomever he played and wherever the character was supposed to have lived.Īnd why not? No one expects the actors in a production of “Julius Caesar” to speak good Latin. Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.” Photograph courtesy Apple TV+Īmericans are so used to seeing history played by Americans that the oddity of it hardly registers anymore.
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