Is Joaquim Phoenix's Napoleon Really Just Arthur Fleck in Period Costume? (And Napoleon Just a Do-Over of Joker?)

Joaquim Phoenix's performance as Napoleon in the recent Ridley Scott biopic has got a good deal of attention for, among much else, Phoenix's constant mumbling of his dialogue.

Considering this I find myself recalling a criticism I made of Joker some time back: that the film's makers seemed unable to think of any figure like Arthur Fleck, a beaten-down working-class man, as possessing any impressive qualities, intellectually or in any other way--could not imagine that a beaten-down working-class man might well be a "genius," or have the seeds of genius in them--even though they also expected us to think of him as the man who (somehow) becomes the famous super-villain who challenges Batman over and over and over again.

That inability seemed to me awfully conventional and conformist, with all the class prejudice that goes with that.

And remembering that I now ask, did Ridley Scott (or whoever did his thinking for him here; the publicity I saw indicates history, reading books, etc. aren't "his thing") imagine Napoleon as Arthur Fleck? A sub-mediocre nonentity disdained by his social "betters" who, as a result of the combination of not being quite sane with a bunch of incredible coincidences, leads to his ending up the mad, bloody-handed central figure in an episode of anger among the lower orders that produces chaos and killing on a wide scale, in the process becoming a "super-villain" of history--a real-life Joker?

Given the film's dismissive attitude toward the significance of the French Revolution and all it produced (at least, insofar as those events may have meant anything in human life other than bloodshed and misery) this does not seem too implausible--or for that matter, original. Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy blasts the reader in the face with his contempt for Napoleon (deriving from the prejudices Tolstoy held at the time as a Joseph de Maistre-reading right-wing romantic and conventionally patriotic Russian aristocrat ferociously arguing for the Counter-Enlightenment), to which end he deploys a deterministic, anti-Great Man view of history (with an inconsistency reflective of his fundamental anti-rationalism here). That alone suffices to provide ample precedent for that treatment of this particular figure--though I doubt that, even acknowledging the many imperfections of Tolstoy's most famous work, anyone will ever regard Scott's film as at all on its level, even if they happen to be capable of properly making the comparison.* (Alas, far more people lie about reading that book than actually read it--one reason, I think, why Thomas Butt's discussion of Napoleon, treating the film as a "deconstruction" of the Great Man theory of history, seems to me fulsome in the credit it accords it.)

* I suggest that those interested in Tolstoy's politics and general world-view at the time that he wrote War and Peace (which they might wonder about my characterization of as they differ importantly from those of the later Tolstoy more famous as humanitarian and political thinker) check out Isaiah Berlin's classic essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox."