Bright spots transcend cliched moments in new Mendes picture
Hollywood loves to make movies about itself. My last review was on The Fablemans, a movie about the magic of movies. This review is about Empire of Light, a movie about the healing power of movies. And my next review will be about Babylon, a movie about, you guessed it, the good and bad of the movie industry. If Hollywood wants to get folks back into theaters, maybe making a bunch of narcissistic films about itself isn’t the best way, but nevertheless, here we are, with three releases within a month that basically say, “Movies are awesome! Go to the movies!!” This week’s offering makes its case mightily, and somewhat succeeds in spite of the pervasive layer of schmaltz that covers the picture.
Yes, Empire of Light drags. Its two-hour run time could easily have been cut by 30 minutes or. And yes it trades on a lot of cliches and overwrought dialog. But you know what? It worked on me. At the end of the film, I was crying like a baby. Maybe the stress of the season or the end of nearly three years of pandemic and political upheaval influenced my reaction, but I found the film cathartic, uplifting, and genuinely moving.
Writer/director Sam Mendes (1917), authoring his first solo script, here trades the battlefields of World War I for the grimness of an early 1980’s small English seaside town. Against the backdrop of Thatcher’s England and the rise of the far-right National Front party, we meet the staff of an art deco theater, the Empire. Mendes focuses on the developing relationship between Hilary (Olivia Colman), the theater’s day manager, and a new employee, Stephen (Micheal Ward). Both are struggling: Hilary with mental health challenges, and Stephen, a young Black man, with the racism surrounding him in their provincial small town. Their connection is the heart of the film, and, while not entirely believable at times, the kindness they show to each other is inspiring nonetheless, even when Mendes tends toward the heavy-handed. The two work together to save a wounded bird, for example: metaphor much?
The film’s broad, earnest messaging of empathy and the healing power of film (“That beam of light is escape,” a character actually says at one point about the projector) is made more palatable thanks to terrific cinematography from legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, who won an Oscar for his work Mendes’s 1917. The way Deakins uses light and shadow in his shots of the Empire Cinema and the seaside creates a sense of magic that even the most jaded filmgoer would be hard-pressed not to admire. And music fans might appreciate the soulful score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Colman does some nice work here, too, despite the screenplay’s shortcomings, managing not to go too over the top in her portrayal of a woman whose personality is markedly different when she is on or off medication. Toby Jones, as the theater projectionist, and Colin Firth, as the theater manager and resident philandering cad, are big names in smaller parts, and both elevate the material’s weaker elements.
Mendes seems to have a lot of ideas he wanted to throw into his story: movies, mental health, racism, connection, family, love, loss, and new beginnings are all touched on. The result of this hodgepodge is that some of these themes are more developed and others are barely explored, but, in the end, Mendes gets enough of his ideas through to leave us feeling hopeful. And if the Philip Larkin poem that’s read at the end doesn’t get you, then your cynicism is more bulletproof than mine.
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Empire of Light opens today at Bay Area theaters.
