Empire of Light (2022)
dir. Sam Mendes
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Searchlight Pictures
Writing in 2012 as chief film critic for British daily The Times, Kate Muir observed of Chariots of Fire, for its 30th anniversary re-release, that the Oscar Best Picture winner has “a simple, undiminished power,” and that it is “utterly compelling.” Chariots of Fire makes an appearance in a critical sequence in writer/director Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light. Set roughly between the fall of 1981 and the spring of 1982, Mendes’s film is a wonderfully realized character study following the lives of the employees at a seaside British cinema. In its own way, with more humble ambitions than the Olympian scope of Chariots of Fire, Empire of Light is also utterly compelling due to its own simple, undiminished power.
Set at the fictional Empire Cinema, Light mainly follows Hilary, a shift manager at the Empire, as well as the newly hired Stephen and the rest of the theater’s staff. A bond forms between the older Hilary and the younger Stephen, and the two engage in on-again/off-again sexual trysts. Over the course of the film, we discover that Hilary has been assigned her job by the government’s social services department. She struggles with mental health issues, possibly what would today be described as severe bipolar disorder.
Hilary is also having an affair – if you can call it that – with her direct superior, the Empire’s general manager, Donald Ellis. The odious Donald only has time for Hilary when he’s interested in seeing her alone in his office. He also makes clear his priorities concerning Hilary when he turns up with his wife at a restaurant where Hilary is dining. The way in which Mendes stages each interaction between Donald and Hilary makes his abuse of power obvious without being explicit.
Then Hilary blows it all up.
It’s during the pivotal Chariots of Fire sequence. The Empire has secured the honor of holding a prestigious première for the film. When Hilary unexpectedly takes the stage after Donald makes his remarks before the screening, she enters an almost fugue state while reading a poem to commemorate the event. The theater lobby becomes a stage all its own as Hilary berates Donald for his despicable treatment of her, all in front of his wife.
The incredibly talented Olivia Colman melts the screen with her portrayal of Hilary. There’s something of Gena Rowlands’s mesmerizing Mabel from A Woman Under the Influence in Colman’s Hilary. (I’m doubling down on my Rowlands comparisons this year, as I made a similar connection between that 1974 performance and Michelle Williams’s work in The Fabelmans.)
Colman brings an explosive unpredictability to the role. It’s hard to overstate how completely different the actor’s screen presence is here compared to her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown. This is one of her best performances in a career marked by her aforementioned turn in The Crown and an Oscar win for playing a different British monarch in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite.
As Donald, Colin Firth continues to amaze with his seemingly effortless ability to play the smarmiest son of a bitch you’ve ever seen on screen while holding on to a likeable public persona, bolstered by so many other roles in which he plays sympathetic and loveable characters.
Twenty-five-year-old Micheal Ward – whom I discovered in the Lovers Rock installment of Steve McQueen’s impeccable Small Axe series – is contemplative and gentle as theater new-hire Stephen. The relationship (both sexual and emotional) between the college-bound Stephen and the middle-aged Hilary illustrates another unspoken tenet of Mendes’s picture: We’re stronger and better people when we help and look after one another. That’s never more obvious than in the harrowing scene in which Stephen must help social services and police get Hilary to safety during a complete mental and emotional break.
Ward displays a rich emotional intelligence in every scene in which he appears. He uses it with expert skill during the scenes in Mendes’s episodic story that focus on his character’s struggles. Stephen – like the Jamaican-born Ward – is a Black, first-generation immigrant. I mentioned Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which is apropos in more ways than the casting. That series focuses on the native British population’s racist treatment of Caribbean immigrants during a major influx from the area throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Empire of Light also tackles the racial resentment of the time, doing its due diligence to spotlight the harm done by the nativist, nationalist ethos of Thatcherism.
One pivotal sequence turns from wonder to horror as a stream of humanity flows by outside the theater. Stephen, Hilary, and the rest of the theater’s employees watch in bemused silence at the impromptu parade until a few of its members stop to gawk at Stephen through the glass doors. They are skinheads, rallying in defense of hate. They smash the glass, consequently smashing the relative peace and harmony of the movie house. The riot that ensues is reminiscent of a similar sequence in Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical Roma.
When I realized that Empire of Light was to be (at least partially) a rumination on the immigrant experience and a condemnation of hate-in-their-heart racism – as opposed to tackling the much more nuanced and pernicious issue of systemic racism – I became apprehensive. Is a white man the best person to tell this story? Do we need yet another movie that will (however justly) dunk on the deplorable ethos of individual racism and tribalism? Talk about low-hanging fruit.
The answer I came up with to my own questions was: Look the fuck around. Nazism – with the help of none other than the artist formerly known as Kanye West – is once again on the rise. No matter how much we all agree that racism is unacceptable and should be abolished from legitimate societal discourse, a significant portion of the population hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
Mendes pulls off a neat trick here by incorporating Chariots of Fire into the centerpiece of his movie. The earlier film is itself partly about a Jewish Olympic running hopeful from Britain who sees the success he has achieved in his field as a repudiation of antisemitism. Like Chariots of Fire, Empire of Light isn’t flashy in how it delivers its message, but that doesn’t detract from its importance.
It’s strange how what I might have suspected was Mendes’s central preoccupation here – the love-letter-to-cinema cliché could easily be applied to Empire of Light – seems rather tacked on when one takes in the entire breadth of what the movie is doing. Toby Jones plays Norman, the Empire’s projectionist, and the character who is most enchanted and transported by what he does for a living.
In one scene, Norman advises Stephen to be careful with the gargantuan metal cases holding the newest titles ready for exhibition. They are “precious cargo” according to Norman. There is also an enchanting scene in which Norman teaches Stephen how to properly change over from one film reel to the next during a screening. (Again, Mendes never has his characters comment on it, but this antiquated way of exhibiting movies had its own little charm, one that is now all but lost.)
About midway through Empire of Light, Norman shares with a coworker some painful family history that’s tied up with his own personality and his chosen profession. It’s a delicate little slice-of-life moment in a delicate little slice-of-life movie that highlights the magic of the cinema, the ugliness of racism, the horror of mental illness, and the determination of the human race to cling to hope and joy in dangerous and scary times.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Empire of Light moved me. It’s as simple as that. This is an unassuming movie that’s power resides in its simplicity and empathy.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I loved spotting all the movie posters of the period. I saw All That Jazz and The Blues Brothers and we’re also treated to clips from Stir Crazy and Being There.
- I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself, but I have to give credit where credit is due: Duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver a beautiful score and Roger Deakins’s cinematography is impeccable, as always.
- The persistence-of-vision speech in movies about movies should feel so clichéd at this point, but, to use a different cliché, I fell for the one in Empire of Light hook, line, and sinker.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Full disclosure: I saw Empire of Light as part of a press screening on December 5, but I didn’t sit down to write my review until December 25. I hate going that long between the screening and writing the review, but I think it was a helpful exercise to test the limits of my recall. I wouldn’t want to keep that kind of schedule regularly, but it was challenging to test my memory. I took a break because, quite honestly, have you looked at the state of the world lately? I’ve been a little overwhelmed for a while (six years or so?) and it finally caught up with me. Here’s to hoping 2023 isn’t quite as off the rails!