'NAPOLEON' FAR FROM COMPLEX.

Byline: - David Kronke

CURIOUS TIMING, A&E premiering a miniseries on the rise and fall of Napoleon just as we're watching Saddam Hussein's regime collapse in real time. The miniseries even includes computer-animated maps of his military pushes around Europe and into Africa that recall, unfortunately, those seen during news networks' Iraqi war coverage.

Your enjoyment of ``Napoleon'' may depend heavily on your affection for costume dramas and elaborate period battle scenes. Pierre-Jean Larroque's costumes and Richard Cunin's production design are splendid, though not always shown to best effect by Guy Defaux's cinematography.

But as written by Didier Decoin (from Max Gallo's biography) and directed by Yves Simoneau (``Nuremberg''), ``Napoleon'' is a pedestrian, workmanlike affair, a typical greatest-hits biography with huge chunks of expository narration connecting scenes in which our anti-hero either engages in battle or woos women. There's not much effort to get inside the emperor's mind, outside of the occasional closeup of star Christian Clavier (who looks sort of like a hunched Leonard Cohen in a silly haircut) staring dementedly, as if attempting to have a self-induced aneurysm or perhaps pass a kidney stone.

In short order, we see Napoleon rise within the French military and win the hand of the widow Josephine (Isabella Rossellini), who merely says, ``I love his love for me.'' While he's off fighting this battle or that, she's busy socializing; when he's home, she's browbeating him (no wonder he wanted to conquer the rest of Europe). Their bickering over taking sundry lovers ends in a draw until he exiles her in favor of a woman of standing who can give him a son. ``Come to me as a man, not a conqueror,'' one of his conquests purrs - what megalomaniac with a short-guy complex wouldn't be won over by a line like that?

In tomorrow night's conclusion, Napoleon demonstrates a Hussein-like inability to read the writing on the wall and concede he's had a long run that's coming to an inevitable end, even as his enemies close in on him and put him out to pasture.

There's no passion behind ``Napoleon,'' no real effort to understand what drives such a rudderlessly power-mad warrior. Clavier struggles to cohere scenes demanding he play sometimes imperious, sometimes maniacal and even swoony (the funniest scenes come when the miniseries struggles to posit Napoleon as a romantic leading man).

Rossellini is saddled with hopelessly clunky lines and occasional attempts to emote; watching her try to do more than radiate her voluptuous cool is a fearsome sight. John Malkovich, playing Tallyrand, Napoleon's Condoleeza Rice and confidante, manages to both ham it up and seem utterly bored, sighing on practically every line with the same hauteur that lost Al Gore the presidential debates. Gerard Depardieu, Anouk Aimee and Julian Sands appear in smaller roles.

Films such as these aren't even helpful to those underschooled in history, who will leave ``Napoleon'' under the impression that vast pockets of epochal history just played out as turgid melodrama.

NAPOLEON - Two stars

What: Miniseries biopic of the infamous French emperor and megalomaniac.

Where: A&E.

When: 8 tonight and Wednesday.

In a nutshell: A dramatic Waterloo.