Empire of Light

Yet another filmmaker looks back on the era of his youth in Sam Mendes’s romantic drama Empire of Light. There was no way this one wasn't going to work for me. As a "brief encounter picture" set in the early '80s about English people that takes place mostly in a cinema, this film basically rings most of my bells. Still, the movie won't do much to change the minds of those who view Mendes as a creator of pretty visuals in search of a story, especially since he's the sole screenwriter here.

Olivia Colman is her reliably wonderful self in the role of Hillary Small, the assistant manager of a seaside cinema showing some of 1980's current releases. The regularity of her job, along with daily doses of lithium, and the fact that movie theaters are havens for those of us who are "a little off," helps give her a sense of normalcy and serenity. She works seven days a week and the routines of her life are consistent: taking tickets, selling candy, chatting with her coworkers, and having unsatisfying, quasi-consensual office sex with the sleazy, married theater manager (Colin Firth). She doesn't even watch the movies her theater runs, so there's even more of a sameness to her life that keeps her emotionally sedated. But soon an attractive young new employee named Stephen (Micheal Ward) joins the team. Stephen has dreams of studying architecture but he doesn't have the money. He's drawn to Hillary's oddly cheerful sense of melancholy, and they soon fall into an unlikely love affair. In some ways Hillary and Steven are kindred spirits, she's a little bit ostracised from society as a single middle-aged woman with mental health issues, and he's a young Black man living during an especially volatile and violent era in Britain's history of race relations.

Mendes doesn't put in the work required to make their relationship fully believable, but the actors carry the day. More detrimental is that his script doesn't explore the complex themes it touches on—race, class, mental health, workplace power dynamics, and how we as humans can be nostalgic about relatively unhappy or even ugly chapters in our lives—in a way that feels satisfying or enlighting. He also lays on the whole "magic of the movies" thing a bit too thick. Toby Jones's characterisation of the little oddball projectionist is accurate to the sort of folks who use to haunt these cavernous spaces—and still do in some cherished venues that still run 35mm (even though the loops he makes when threading the projectors are way too large). But do all films about the magic of cinema have to have a scene in which a character explains how projection works with the human eye to create the illusion of movement?

What I loved about the film, is how accurately it captures both the way a great old cinema can feel like a sanctuary or even a womb, as well as the flip side of that, which is that many of us escape into this womblike sanctuary to avoid dealing with the real world. Empire of Light is also a gorgeous film, thanks to Mendes’s frequent collaborator, the peerless Roger Deakins, though I do wish Deakins had returned to shooting on 35mm for this movie—it would have given the picture an even more authentic feel.

Twitter Capsule: