Mark Reviews Movies: EMPIRE OF LIGHT

Empire of Light, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 8, 2022

Very little about Empire of Light feels authentic. That's not because of the setting, the performances, or the broad details of these characters, who are simply trying to get by while working at a movie palace in England during the early 1980s. The combination of all of these elements, though, comes across as manipulative and calculated in a way that also—and oddly—never achieves any kind of impact, because writer/director Sam Mendes doesn't seem to have an idea as to how to add all of it up to something with meaning or significance.

Some of that uncertainty comes from the story's split perspective. At first, we follow Hilary (Olivia Colman), the duty manager at the once-grand but still-pretty-fancy Empire Cinema somewhere on the southern coast. Her life is a series of small and lonely routines, whether she's at work—setting up the concession stand, making sure employees are ready to go for the day, and counting ticket stubs—or she's at home—fixing single meals, listening to music, and making sure to take a pill every morning.

Soon enough, we discover that Hilary is seeing a psychiatrist and has been prescribed lithium. There's the discomforting sense of a countdown to the character's seemingly inevitable crisis of mental health as a means of raising the dramatic stakes within an otherwise everyday sort of story.

Indeed, the movie begins as a series of routines for Hilary, as she goes to work, returns home, and occasionally carries on a rather rote affair with her boss Donald (Colin Firth), a married man with dreams of seeing the Empire return to its former glory. We meet the theater's other employees, ushers Neil (Tom Brooke) and Janine (Hannah Onslow), as well as long-time projectionist Norman (Toby Jones), but the real story begins with the arrival of new employee Stephen (Michael Ward).

He's a charming, handsome, and soft-spoken young man who needs a job after being turned down for college. As he puts his ambitions of becoming an architect on hold, this place will do.

With the setup in place, Mendes' screenplay throws a lot of narrative and thematic ideas into the air. There's the fact, as well as the preordained doom, of Hilary's mental illness—the specifics of which are kept as a mystery for a while, because the fact and apparent fate of it are the only things that matter for the character. There's the rise of racism in the backdrop, as Stephen, a Black man and the son of immigrants to the country, occasionally encounters prejudice from customers and violence from a gang of skinheads wandering the streets. Just as with the subject of mental illness, the movie presents the matter of this bigotry as a way to elevate the tension of this story, without confronting it or examining it in any meaningful way.

For the most part, the tale is a star-crossed romance, as the lonely Hilary and the in-between Stephen connect over a wounded pigeon in the abandoned part of the theater and watching a fireworks display from the roof. That's about it. One of the major shortcomings of this story is this bond, which certainly has the appearance of a sumptuous romance when cinematographer Roger Deakins captures the two in the warm glow of the theater's sign. Appearance, though, doesn't make up for what's missing.

This bond develops rather quickly without developing much about the romance at all. That's especially true from the perspective of Stephen, who's heartbroken over his educational future and a previous relationship. Such details, though, don't translate into convincing us of some deeper connection to Hilary, especially since the character comes across as set on her own, isolated path toward that mental health crisis (She stops taking her medication, for example, because of the natural high of the romance). Mendes really doesn't convince when Hilary tries to downplay a racist customer's behavior, only to change the subject when Stephen tries to explain what it's like to live among such social and political conditions. Even the filmmaker doesn't seem to buy his central relationship, if the existence of Stephen's mother (played by Tanya Moodie) in the third act as a way of confirming how important Hilary is to her son is any indication.

The last major idea within Empire of Light—obviously, given the main locale—is some general sense of the inherent magic of the movies. Stephen loves them as a means of escape (Mendes drops some titles, recognizable music, and, somehow, clips from only two of the movies playing at the theater), and with Norman's help, he learns how the projectors create the illusion of life on the giant screen. It's schmaltzy, to be sure, but with such moments and a climactic one where someone first discovers that magic, there's at least some feeling that Mendes actually believes the notion and wants us to believe it, too. The same can't be said of the abundance of other half-considered ideas in this story.

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