Make a movie about the power of cinema and you'd better be sure that the evidence supports your thesis. At best, you might wind up with something rich and personal like The Fabelmans, and at worst, well, you're stuck with Babylon, the kind of self-congratulatory ode to the dream factory that makes a pretty good case for watching TV on a smartphone (if not burning down your local multiplex altogether).
For British filmmaker Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty, Skyfall and, more recently, the WWI drama 1917, the movies still matter – as an art form that can generate empathy, inspire emotion, and maybe even transcend a reality that's confusing and sometimes hostile.
He stages his latest drama, Empire of Light, in and around a cinema, a grand, old Art Deco structure clinging to existence in a dreary seaside town in the south of England. In the film's opening moments, it seems to come back to life before our eyes, regenerating from faded relic to warm, twinkling monument to a more romantic era.
It's a little bit of an illusion. The film is set in the dying, not especially glamorous days of 1980, and the cinema is run by a small staff servicing what seems to be a relatively sparse clientele.
When she's not tearing 1-pound-50 tickets and placating irascible customers, the Empire Cinema's middle-aged duty manager Hilary (Oscar winner Olivia Colman, The Favourite) is performing tawdry, back-office sexual favours for her unhappily married boss (a stuffy and officious Colin Firth, surely dispatching any remaining traces of affection for his erstwhile Mr Darcy).
The lonely, knitwear-clad Hilary isn't much of a stretch for Colman – coming off the complex, unravelling figure at the centre of Maggie Gyllenhaal's Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter – but there's more to the character than it seems. Hilary has also recently returned from a spell in the local mental hospital, where she was prescribed lithium for what appears to be bipolar disorder.
Things begin to look up with the arrival of Stephen (Micheal Ward, Small Axe: Lovers Rock), a young usher who's handsome, cool (he's into two-tone), and knows how to tend to a pigeon's broken wing – just imagine what he can do for a forlorn middle-aged lady!
One rooftop kiss later and Hilary's swapping out her Joni Mitchell records for The Specials and experiencing a sexual awakening in the abandoned upper floor of the cinema – a romantic tryst that, because Stephen is Black, plays out in secret against a Thatcherite Britain curdled with renewed race hate.
Empire of Light isn't strictly autobiographical, at least not in the mode of Spielberg's The Fabelmans or Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, but Mendes does tap into his teenage memories of the time, and he draws upon his mother – who suffered from bipolar disorder – in crafting Hilary, a woman clearly misunderstood, and often patronised, by doctors and social workers alike.
Hilary's precarious state is the emotional centre of the film, and – in Colman's committed, sometimes tender performance – the source of its most affecting moments, but the strangely lethargic drama often feels like it's labouring under its own fog of lithium-induced torpor. (The listless, kneading piano score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross doesn't help the film's energy.)
For all of Colman's determination, Mendes often leaves her performance hanging. In one scene, Hilary has a breakdown in front of a chalkboard scrawled with crude epithets that make her apartment look more like a serial killer's lair; despite Colman's best efforts to wring pathos from the moment, it tilts toward the comedic — a parody of 'crazy' that undermines the supposed humanity of the scene.
Empire of Light lurches uneasily between these passages of psychological breakdown and the sort of well-intentioned but broad-stroke social drama intended to highlight racial prejudice, never really cohering as an effective exploration of either.
Mendes has said that the film's exploration of race, in which Stephen is bullied and beaten by a gang of skinheads, was the result of his writing the film at the time of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 – but it sometimes feels like a whim that wound up being underdeveloped.
Though nicely played by Ward, Stephen can come across as a prop for Hilary's dramatic journey; a collection of period tropes for the film to make rudimentary points about the ills of racism. (Compare this to the richness of Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock, in which Ward also starred, or Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, two films evoking the contemporaneous experience of Black British youth.)
Though Mendes makes a sincere-enough attempt to sketch out a world for Stephen and, briefly, his Trinidadian mother (Tanya Moodie), these characters never really flourish – like Hilary, they seem designed to be pawns in the film's ultimate message: that of the good old power of the movies.
What's most surprising, in that sense, is just how creaky the film is at crafting its love letter to celluloid.
We barely see evidence of a film being screened until well over halfway into proceedings – a glimpse of the gala premiere of the dull Chariots of Fire is hardly cause for celebration – and when we do, it's a snippet of Sidney Poitier's Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder classic Stir Crazy, which almost feels like Mendes taking a feeble swing at a metaphor for… mental illness and racial harmony? (Let's give him the benefit of the doubt; funny movie, after all.)
Penning his first solo screenplay, Mendes – when he's not cribbing poetry from Auden, Eliot and Tennyson – defaults to laying on all-purpose speeches on the magic of the movies.
Most of these fall to poor Toby Jones, playing the Empire's veteran projectionist, who's tasked with earnestly delivering eye-rollers such as, "If I run the film at 24 frames per second, you don't see the darkness." Got it. Moving pictures: Who knew, huh?
The film's paean to popcorn really ramps up once Hilary – who we're supposed to believe has never seen a single movie in the cinema where she works – finally submits to the projected beams of light, a moment that Mendes films as though she's experiencing a whole new world.
It's not exactly as dumb as the risible closing sequence of Babylon – what could be? – but it's still pretty silly, with Colman reduced to a slack-jawed stare of wonder as Hal Ashby's Being There un-spools before her eyes.
The whole thing is a strangely lifeless misstep for Mendes, especially considering its grounding in the highly personal.
For a film dedicated to the wonder of moving images, Empire of Light does the medium few favours. And that's the last thing the art form needs right now.
Empire of Light is in cinemas now.
