Empire of Light

There’s no nice way of putting it, but for this writer, to see the words ​“Direct­ed by Sam Mendes” in the vicin­i­ty of a movie title is about as appeal­ing as a plat­ter of expired offal. As one of Britain’s lead­ing direc­to­r­i­al lights and a per­pet­u­al secur­er of crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial plau­dits, I have felt it a duty to keep my hand in with Mendes’ per­pet­u­al­ly- mid­dle­brow out­put as a way to broad­en my hori­zons and keep tabs on the ebbs and flows of The Cur­rent Cinema.

It was with cus­tom­ary trep­i­da­tion, then, that I hiked along to take in Empire of Light, a mod­ern peri­od dra­ma also writ­ten by Mendes which takes in the domes­tic and emo­tion­al foibles of the staff at a sea-front pic­ture palace on England’s south coast dur­ing the ear­ly 1980s. The crush­ing weight of poten­tial dis­ap­point­ment was allied some­what by the fact that the film stars Olivia Col­man, who has right­ly risen up to be recog­nised as one of the world’s great­est screen actors. And she is mirac­u­lous and heart­break­ing here. Com­mit­ted and thought­ful too. It’s the grav­i­ty of her pres­ence that sells a sto­ry that would’ve fall­en to pieces with­out the nec­es­sary heft she brings to the production.

She plays Hilary, a qui­et­ly offi­cious cin­e­ma duty man­ag­er who refus­es to watch the films, and is being used for sex by Col­in Firth’s blus­tery boss. She falls into a sur­pris­ing but authen­ti­cal­ly-drawn rela­tion­ship with Michael Ward’s school leaver Stephen, who sees Hilary as a por­tal away from the scads of racial abuse he receives from both patrons in the cin­e­ma and the maraud­ing skin­heads on the streets.

Mendes and his cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Roger Deakins cap­ture the land­scape in crisp, blank-ish wide shots, empha­sis­ing the essen­tial lone­li­ness of the pro­tag­o­nists as well as the cav­ernous emp­ty space that comes from being inside a cin­e­ma. The film takes a mid-point turn and sud­den­ly shifts its focus onto some­thing more inter­est­ing. We dis­cov­er a bit more of Hilary’s trag­ic back­ground, and the film sud­den­ly drills down to some­thing mov­ing and hon­est about the super­fi­cial nature of friend­ship and how our abil­i­ty to sup­press past demons is not always as suc­cess­ful as mere­ly hid­ing them from others.

As a whole, the film doesn’t real­ly work, as Mendes is far more suc­cess­ful in deal­ing with psy­cho­log­i­cal issues than he is with polit­i­cal ones. Struc­tural­ly, the film is a mess, and the­mat­i­cal­ly its mak­er is unable to see the wood for the trees. It’s even­tu­al and half-heart­ed ode to The Pow­er of Cin­e­ma™ feels tacked on and insin­cere, anoth­er dis­parate ele­ment of a film that offers up a whole, jum­bled col­lec­tion of them. Yet this is worth see­ing for Colman’s stag­ger­ing turn, which unfor­tu­nate­ly leaves her co-stars (and direc­tor) in the dust.