Joaquin Phoenix (49 years old) returns to the crime scene. Or, less lyrically, he returns to the director who some time ago offered him the first role of all those to come.
That is, 23 years after giving life to Emperor Commodus in Gladiatorputs itself back in the hands of Ridley Scott to embody another maximum sovereign. Napoleon It is the umpteenth attempt by cinema, since Abel Gance’s glorious waste in 1927 to Stanley Kubrick’s failed attempt, to turn the screen into the stage for all dreams of power, greatness and the most august failure.
And in the center, an actor determined to be the best of all, the most intense, the most humble, the most superb and the most Phoenix. Equally capable of perfectly reproducing Johnny Cash’s voice and of losing weight to the point of anemia to play a disturbed person with pretentiousness, now he simply rises to the top and, from there, lets himself fall.
He receives us in a central hotel in Madrid and he does so, he says, despite himself. «I would have liked to rent an apartment with my wife to get to know the city. I told him as soon as we left the airport. But it has been arriving and the harassment of the paparazzi and those asking for autographs… In the end, I haven’t left the hotel,” he says nonchalantly, sits down and stares his almost transparent eyes (much more so than on the screen). He impresses.