Empire of Light will hit theaters in the U.S. on Dec. 9, and U.K. theaters on Jan. 13.
Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light is the rare movie about movies that might make you despise the entire artform. One of the worst “prestige pictures” in years, it’s a soulless, artless, deeply misguided period film where all the pieces seem attractive on paper, but end up assembled in a form so shockingly un-cinematic as to induce annoyance at best. Set in a coastal English town in the early 1980s, it’s nominally about the changing tides of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and nominally about the power of moving images — the characters all happen to work in a movie theater, you see — but it’s only “about” these things if you really strain yourself to make the connections. It would be like calling a phone book a romantic paperback.
Romance is central to Empire of Light as well, since it follows a listless, depressed, middle-aged theater manager, Hillary (Olivia Colman), who finds a much-needed spark when a young ticket-taker, Stephen (Micheal Ward), joins her staff for a summer before leaving for university. But this dynamic becomes increasingly buried beneath a barrage of disconnected subplots, whose literal and symbolic meanings Mendes can’t seem to connect, or express with any kind of verve. Worse yet, the writer-director assembles a genuine dream-team for the project, between Colman, cinematographer Roger Deakins (Skyfall), editor Lee Smith (Dunkirk), and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network), which makes the end result all the more baffling and infuriating.
Stephen is young and suave, and Hillary is at times moody and unpredictable, traits which neither character is allowed to exist beyond, even as the movie follows them through both private and public moments. The two-screen theater itself, named Empire, is an alluring space that feels plucked out of a glorious past; it may be run down, but it once housed more ornate screens and event spaces, which have been locked away from the staff and customers, but which Stephen and Hillary frequent as their covert meeting spots. This dust-covered palace, hidden away above the main theater, is also meant to evoke a murky future for cinema, but Mendes never manages to establish why this setting in particular might be a worthwhile venue for such an inquiry. Not just the setting of the early ’80s, mind you, a period of box-office plenty, but the setting of a movie theater itself. For the most part, you could set this story in practically any other place of business, like a bowling alley, and have it be relatively unchanged.
Perhaps the only thing that would change is the sudden, wide-eyed conversations about moving images, which enter the story almost at random, courtesy of the theater’s projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones), which have little bearing on any of the characters. Norman waxes poetic to Stephen about the ability of light to illuminate, and the brain’s ability to filter out darkness when watching 24 flickering frames a second. But this idea — meant to speak to notions of optimism — becomes downright offensive once Stephen’s story begins to unfold.
As a young Black man in Thatcher’s Britain, Stephen has it far from easy, and he even falls victim to local skinheads on occasion; what is he to do with any of Norman’s musings about seeing the light in a scenario such as this? Even stranger is the fact that Hillary witnesses one such instance of Stephen being accosted and verbally abused because of his race, which amounts to… nothing at all. A similar 1980s-set story from this year, Armageddon Time, at least frames the cowardice of a young James Gray, in his refusal to stand up for his Black friend, as a failure of white liberal America (and white Jewish America) to act on and reckoning with racism at pivotal moments in history. In Empire of Light, the view of the past is about as complex and detailed as “What if a white woman witnessed a hate crime? Wouldn’t that be awkward?”
Hillary certainly has her own troubles to deal with, between hints of a prior mental breakdown, and a boss (Colin Farrell) who seems to have cornered her into an affair. Her frustrations are frequently misdirected towards Stephen, but are often flattened into afflicted rants and ravings about men in general, and about hegemonies which the film seems none too eager to unpack, since Stephen has his own demons to deal with, and Hillary hasn’t exactly been helpful in that regard. “You should read the newspaper,” he tells her at one point, as if Empire of Light’s key tactic is to raise some kind of nebulous awareness — but what’s more eye-opening than witnessing a hate-crime first hand? Though perhaps more accidentally eye-opening is that the film reduces even racially motivated violence to window dressing for a story about nothing and no one. It all but disconnects the inhumane from humanity itself, and severs the rising white supremacy of the era from the whiteness of its characters as it thoughtlessly meanders from scene to scene with nothing to say.
Imagine wasting Olivia Colman at her peak? Unforgivable.
Some of this might be forgivable if it were a story whose textures and images conveyed some kind of meaning in silence, but it’s all plainly conceived. The lighting is occasionally warm, the music occasionally operatic, but none of these elements feel jagged when things go awry for Stephen, or when Hillary’s behavior becomes too erratic to manage, in a way that the film itself seems unprepared to capture. So, it merely shoves her off into a corner, and even keeps her off-screen for extended periods, instead of confronting the ways in which she comes undone. Imagine wasting Olivia Colman at her peak? Unforgivable.
For all its scattered musings about cinematic images, there’s barely a scene where Mendes’ own imagery feels purposeful. Enormous moments, like a parade of skinhead demonstrators seen from behind glass doors, or fireworks on New Year’s Eve as romance blossoms, have no intimacy — no grounding in discernible point of view — and the film’s intimate moments don’t seem to register at all, given the lifelessness with which they’re captured and staged, like somebody left the camera running during a table read. The only characters with anything resembling real humanity are the world-weary Norman, and another one of Hillary and Stephen’s young coworkers, Neil (Tom Brooke), who observes all the unfolding stories at a distance, from behind his enormous glasses, and comments on them with trepidation. But these fully formed people may as well be inconveniences to Empire of Light. Their richness and complications are too threatening for a film with the didactic morality of a Paw Patrol episode, and about the same nuanced understanding of post-punk socio-politics.
An embarrassment of a movie, it gestures towards its own lofty emotional richness where none exists at all, and it comes wrapped in some of the most dull and lifeless filmmaking this side of a Microsoft Word tutorial. It’s an unfathomable failure of technique and imagination, and quite frankly, a waste of everyone’s time.
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