Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Napoleon may be his greatest epic yet—or a total stinker. Either way, watching Joaquin Phoenix portray Bonaparte, it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to fully forget Danny DeVito. DeVito’s version exists of course only in the imaginations of viewers of Get Shorty, the 1995 movie in which he plays a conceited method actor playing Bonaparte. These contradictory versions of the first modern tyrant, one sublime, one silly, have a long and entwined history. Since he came to prominence with “a whiff of grapeshot” in 1795, the world has been divided between those who revere him and those who blow raspberries.
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