Gazing out of “Napoleon” with sly, cat-eyed calculation, Vanessa Kirby turns the whole movie into a power game, one that eclipses the more brutal expressions of might on the battlefield. Of course, the epic contains cavalry campaigns at Austerlitz and Waterloo, a burning Moscow and an unfortunate Great Pyramid used for cannon target practice — it prints the facts and the legend both.
But take us back to Joséphine’s drawing room, where dom-versus-dom dynamics result in a showdown that could have filled several seasons of reality TV, with Kirby’s purr often carrying the day. She gets the film’s final word, haunting Napoleon from beyond the grave, just as she reportedly colonized his last gasp on his deathbed.
Kirby’s Joséphine joins the sisterhood of director Ridley Scott’s women, characters marked by strength and savvy, overtly in “Thelma & Louise” and “G.I. Jane,” but just as palpably in scene-stealing turns from Lorraine Bracco in 1987’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Jodie Comer in “The Last Duel” and Lady Gaga in the deep-dish-of-crazy “House of Gucci.” Though his choice in scripts can sometimes be suspect, Scott may be the movies’ most consistent stealth feminist.
“Ripley was such a reference for me,” Kirby says via video call of Scott’s most iconic female creation, brought to life by Sigourney Weaver in the 1979 classic “Alien.” Clad in black and in a thoughtful mood, Kirby is game to indulge my pet theory — up to a point.