Saltburn--The title refers to the enormous, somewhat faded English country mansion in which most of the movie unfolds. But it may also suggest the proverbial pain of salt poured into a wound, as might be caused by the very sight of such a residence and the class system it represents.
Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a slight, nebbishy scholarship student to Oxford, is befriended by a classmate, the blueblood Adonis Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him home for the summer to the title pile of bricks in 2007. Felix's family is a fairly gothic bunch--abstracted Dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), blithe, cordial Mom Lady Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and addled wreck of a sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), along with the sneering biracial American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). Carey Mulligan is also around as Elsbeth's nutty parasitical friend Pamela, as is Paul Rhys as the imperious butler Duncan.
Rather quickly, Oliver finds himself enmeshed with each of the family members, and drawn into the intrigues and occasional casual decadence of their isolated and mysterious lifestyle. While Oliver initially seems like an honest but in-over-his-head parvenu, like Balzac's Rastingnac or Faulkner's Ben Quick, we gradually see that he has his own wormy, calculating, opportunistic side.
This is the second feature written and directed by Emerald Fennell of 2020's Promising Young Woman. If it's a sophomore slump, that probably says more about the incisive brilliance and focus of Promising Young Woman than it does about any shortfalls of its own. The fury that charged Fennell's first film was direct and uncomplicated. Seemingly wanting to get across something more subtle and nuanced about class, Saltburn flails around a bit and sometimes feels confused, overwrought, overlong, even borderline campy.
But stick with it. It ultimately adds up to a potent piece of moviemaking, and of storytelling. Shot with hallucinatory garishness by the marvelous Linus Sandgren, the movie brings its setting vibrantly to life; there's none of the comforting stodginess of, say, Downton Abbey to it. Better, Fennell's narrative is involving. Even as we sense the influence of everything from The Shining to Risky Business, we're also pulled into investment in a yarn we haven't seen before. And she doesn't let us down; despite the movie's gratuitous thrashing about, in the end the plot snaps together to a satisfying and fairly devastating point.
Fennell also gets uniformly superb performances from her cast. Probably the wittiest and most endearing is Rosamund Pike, but Barry Keoghan, maybe the single best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin, is spectacular here, giving a tour de force turn in a role that is not only wildly mercurial on an emotional and psychological level, but also required physical fearlessness. Saltburn may end up being most remembered for literalizing a common expression for finding somebody extremely attractive, but Keoghan's draining performance makes a splash.
Napoleon--Returning to France, uninvited, from exile in Elba, the title character is confronted with a regiment of soldiers he used to command. "I missed you," he tells them, seemingly sincerely. Soon he's back in charge.
Apparently there is some historical basis for this scene; Napoleon is said to have had a fond and comradely relationship with his troops, despite his willingness to get them slaughtered. But to the casual viewer of this Ridley Scott epic, the moment may come as a surprise. Nothing in the movie prepares us for it. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Napoleon shows little affection or even interest toward anyone or anything apart from himself, and a certain almost adolescent erotic fixation on Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In between campaigns, he makes rather unromantic attempts to impregnate her, and reacts with sullen outrage when they don't succeed.
Scott's movie, based on a script by David Scarpa, is largely a pageant of carnage. It begins with a graphic depiction of Marie Antoinette's meeting with Madame Guillotine, then shows us Napoleon navigating the deadly mayhem of the Revolution and the First Republic. It then traces him from battle to battle: Toulon, Austerlitz, Moscow and some of his other greatest hits, culminating, of course, against Wellington (Rupert Everett) at You-Know-Where.
This Napoleon isn't boring. It's entirely watchable and well-staged. Scott deploys his forces with the care of a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor. But it doesn't really hit hard emotionally; something is missing from it. Early on, we see a cannonball splat into the chest of a horse, and the resulting explosion of gore is so obviously computer-generated that, for me at least, it carried little shock (it has this in common with the splatter effects in Thanksgiving, which, exhaustingly enough, I saw the same day). This sort of detached unreality hangs over the movie's horrors, and the same detachment extends to the central character.
While Phoenix holds our attention with his movie star charisma, it's as if he's working in a vacuum. Except here and there in his scenes with Kirby's drolly unflappable Josephine, Phoenix seems to be anomic, walled off from the other characters by his own narcissistic self-regard. Maybe that's deliberate; maybe Scott is trying to dramatize the Napoleon of Walter de la Mare's unforgettable poem:
What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I.
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky.
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.
In any case, the movie has a point to make about the appetite for an autocratic "strongman" leader that seems to inevitably arise in reaction to the messiness of democratic movements. It's a theme which would, admittedly, seem to have a slight smidge of relevance to our current times. It should be noted that, warmongering megalomaniac though he was, Napoleon was also a tremendously intelligent and curious person, which puts him in a very different category than our most notable current would-be Emperor.
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