There is a shallowness to Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, as if it’s more interested in grand displays of emotion than reflecting the full-body experience of someone’s life. Mendes has called it a tribute to his own mother. Others have declared it a love letter to cinema. So why is it so oddly impersonal? So cold? So closed off from its audience?
Set in 1981, within a fictional Margate cinema named the Empire, it concerns a love affair that seems predicated mostly on sorrow. Hilary Small (Olivia Colman), middle-aged, lives half-invisible with a psychiatric disorder. Stephen (Micheal Ward), significantly younger, is the son of Caribbean immigrants faced with the daily trauma of a racist England.
