Empire of Light
Sam Mendes (2022)
Another labour of love by a big-name director, another good-looking dud … Two days after Alejandro González Iñárritu stressed to the London Film Festival (LFF) audience the personal significance of Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Sam Mendes explained to same what Empire of Light meant to him. Mendes recalled his mother’s struggles with mental illness. He spoke of his increasing passion for cinema and awareness of racism in the England of his teenage years (he was born in Reading in 1965 and grew up in London and Oxford). The main character in his new film, set in the early 1980s in a town on the English south coast, is Hilary Small (Olivia Colman), forty-something and schizophrenic. Hilary works, when she’s well enough, as duty manager at the Empire cinema, where she makes friends, and enjoys a short-lived physical relationship, with Stephen (Micheal Ward), the cinema’s only Black member of staff. The elements that impelled Mendes to make Empire of Light are very clearly present in his story but he doesn’t create anything like a convincing drama from them.
The fundamental problem is the script. Sam Mendes hadn’t written for the screen before 1917 (2019), on which he shared the screenplay credit with Krysty Wilson-Cairns. This time, he’s the sole writer – perhaps he felt the material was too much his to entrust to others. Going it alone, Mendes fails to reconcile the nostalgic impulse behind Empire of Light with its weightier themes. Psychological breakdown fares relatively well, thanks to Olivia Colman; the treatment of racism is shallow and evasive. Stephen isn’t on the receiving end of casual racial prejudice from any of the other cinema workers, a motley crew that Mendes wants to be variously endearing – except for Mr Ellis (Colin Firth), the obnoxious manager. But even Ellis seems egalitarian in that he treats all his staff despicably. (Hilary is regularly summoned to his office for a quickie.) There’s only one Empire customer whose face and words exude racist hatred – a splenetic pensioner (Ron Cook) with a bag of greasy chips that Stephen won’t let him take into a screening.
Virtually all the racism in the film is outside the Empire (despite its loaded name) – until, that is, a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads marches past and a couple of them, who threatened Stephen in the street in an earlier scene, catch sight of him in the cinema entrance. Staff lock the glass doors urgently but in vain. The gang smashes its way in, there’s mayhem in the foyer and Stephen is badly beaten up. This is a doubly unfortunate sequence. First, it smacks of a highly accomplished director of action cinema feeling he needs a kinetic highlight. Second, the gang’s violence is made to seem more deplorable because it invades the sanctum of a cinema – a point liable to be lost on the bleeding, barely conscious Stephen. He and Hilary, despite their obvious dissimilarity, have brains and sensitivity in common but they barely mention the ethnic difference or the twenty-odd years’ age gap between them. Nor does anyone else in any serious way: their colleague Neil (Tom Brooke), seeing the pair returning in quick succession from the upper floor of the cinema, puts two and two together. His jaw drops. It’s a sitcom moment for all that Tom Brooke’s reaction is typically well judged.
Mendes’s nostalgic lens is a problem too in the film’s portrait of its title character. There’s no reason why the Empire shouldn’t be both fleapit and a beacon of faded grandeur. The opening scene, at cinema closing time, is promising: the staff clear up popcorn and swap stories of the worst thing they’ve ever found in a deserted auditorium (or nearly deserted: Hilary says she found a man who’d died in his seat). For the most part, though, the place is impersonally plush. The staff uniforms are a credible colour combination – aubergine and maroon – but always look pristine, fresh from the production wardrobe. Much of the location filming was done in Margate; the Empire, according to a local online newspaper (KentOnline), is ‘Dreamland’s former cinema transformed into a stylish retro picturehouse’. Too right: when Ellis manages to get it chosen to host the regional premiere of Chariots of Fire, transforming the place for the occasion isn’t a big enough deal. Even the cobwebbed upper part of the building – the site of two disused cinema screens, where pigeons now rule the roost and Hilary’s romance with Stephen takes root – is dilapidated in a sanitised way. (You don’t smell the damp or notice the pigeon droppings.) After Roger Deakins’s great work on 1917, it’s hardly surprising that Mendes wanted to work with him again but the prestige-picture sheen of this new film feels wrong for its subject and setting. KentOnline also reported that: ‘When filming started in February, Marine Terrace was strewn with fake snow and hung with festoon lights … turning it into a picture postcard’. Too right again.
The story begins late on Christmas Eve. After locking up the cinema, Hilary walks through the snowy street back to her flat. Next day, she eats her festive meal alone there. In case we don’t get the point, Mendes places a single Christmas cracker beside her plate – a signal of the overemphatic direction to come. The Empire’s projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones), frowns upon trespassers on his territory but the reels of film are heavy for him to lift; he accepts Stephen’s offer of help with them and lets him enter the holy of holies. Stephen is fascinated by the projectionist’s booth, its wall covered in movie stills, even before Norman starts to wax lyrical about the magic of film. This might indeed have been a magical moment if Mendes hadn’t accompanied it with a burst of wonder-filled music (untypical of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for the film, which majors in dribbling melancholy). Toby Jones and Micheal Ward would have managed perfectly well without it.
That misjudgment is all the more surprising on the part of a director who loves good actors as much as Sam Mendes evidently does. This came through strongly in his welcome of nearly all the main cast to the Southbank Centre stage as he introduced Empire of Light at the film’s gala premiere screening. This is the first Mendes film to be shown at LFF since his first feature, American Beauty (1999); his pleasure in the ‘homecoming’ was clearly genuine – ditto his delight at having had the chance to work with the likes of Tom Brooke and Toby Jones, in addition to a star name like Olivia Colman. Except for Colin Firth as self-important, sleazy Mr Ellis (sleaze is way outside Firth’s limited range), the performances in Empire of Light are strong. For this viewer, it naturally helped that the cast included personal favourites – in addition to Brooke, Colman and Jones, there’s Monica Dolan, in a brief but telling appearance as a social services officer who supervises Hilary’s sectioning. But others, good as they are, are stymied by poorly written roles. At the start, Hannah Onslow is vivid as the young usherette Janine, who makes very clear that she fancies Stephen. After going out with her and a group of her friends, he tells Hilary he felt uncomfortable in their company. Although she’s still around and you know she’d have something to say about Stephen’s relationship with Hilary, Janine is then virtually dropped from the film.
Tanya Moodie and Crystal Clarke are worse served still – a reflection of Mendes’s unfortunately perfunctory treatment of his few Black characters. Moodie (so good in the television comedy Motherland) plays Stephen’s mother, Delia. Even before she’s seen, Delia is a British-African-Caribbean cliché: we learn from Stephen that she came over on Windrush, that she’s a single parent whose husband left her, that she works as an NHS nurse (as Hilary discovers upstairs at the Empire, she has taught her son how to tend a pigeon with a broken wing …). This still hardly prepares you for Delia’s eventual appearance. When Stephen is assaulted by the skinheads and taken to hospital, Hilary follows the ambulance in a taxi. She’s met on the hospital ward by the nurse looking after him. Guess who it is. Tanya Moodie’s commanding presence, rather than disguising the inadequacy of her part, draws attention to it. Crystal Clarke has even less to do as Stephen’s post-Hilary girlfriend.
The role of Stephen, though it’s the second largest, is also underwritten. It’s never easy to believe why he gets into a relationship with Hilary in the first place even if her erratic behaviour is reason enough for him then to back out of it. Stephen starts ushering at the Empire after leaving school and trying unsuccessfully to enter higher education. Hilary encourages him to try again, and he eventually gets a university place. When he tells her about it – ‘Bristol, architecture’ – you can almost hear Sam Mendes saying to himself, ‘Oh, yes, that’ll do’, as he wrote the script. And, of course, Stephen is heading off for Bristol ‘tomorrow’, to sharpen the poignancy of his departure from Hilary’s point of view. There’s no doubt about Micheal Ward’s sensitive charm and charisma, and he and Olivia Colman work well together, but Stephen is conceived less as a personality in his own right than as a vehicle – for the racism theme and for affecting the heroine.
Hilary Small is educated, not unattractive but essentially dishevelled – someone whose life has gone wrong. Olivia Colman successfully conveys both her depression and her volatility. Colman’s particularly powerful when Hilary and Stephen take a bus trip to Hastings, where they spend time together on a windswept, deserted beach. Nervously giggly as they undress to swim in the sea, Hilary is then upset by something Stephen says while they’re building an elaborate sand castle, which she demolishes. Mendes tends to showcase Colman too much. The Chariots of Fire premiere turns into a setting for Hilary to confirm, in a startlingly public way, that she’s going over the edge. (To Ellis’s horror, she follows him to the microphone to say more than a few words; for afters, she announces to his wife (Sara Stewart) that Ellis has been regularly screwing them both.) A monologue in which Hilary describes – and relives – her terrible relationships with her parents stands out even more as a big number that Mendes has designed for his lead. But Olivia Colman is tenaciously empathetic and engaging.
There are bits of effective writing in Empire of Light. Norman’s pep talk to sorrowful Hilary is a tired idea that the dialogue and Toby Jones’s delivery of it transcend. Norman tells Hilary not to run away – as he did when he left his wife and their child years ago. When Hilary asks why, Norman replies, in an appalled, incredulous tone, ‘I can’t remember’. Some of Mendes’s details also feel spot on – the range of confectionery on sale at the Empire box office, a list of local bigwigs and VIPs invited to the Chariots of Fire premiere that includes Steve Ovett and Dora Bryan. (The seaside town of the film goes unnamed but the Hastings bus makes clear enough it’s not far from Brighton. Dora Bryan lived much of her life there; Steve Ovett is Brighton born and raised; his rivalry with Sebastian Coe, at its peak in 1980-81, gave added popular impetus to Chariots of Fire‘s portrait of two British Olympic athletics champions of an earlier era.) Reviewing the film for Sight and Sound (October 2022), Tom Charity was mostly complimentary but queried the chronological accuracy of what’s on at the Empire, which he reckoned ‘a couple of years out’. This is usually just the kind of thing to vex me too (see The Duke, for instance) but I didn’t have a problem with it. I well remember the frustrating time lag between London and provincial film release dates throughout the 1970s. I found it easy to accept that the Empire was showing All That Jazz, The Blues Brothers, Gregory’s Girl, Raging Bull and Stir Crazy the year after they first opened (Charity’s ‘a couple of years out’ is an exaggeration anyway).
Mendes has been at pains to stress that Empire of Light is more than a retrospective paean to the cinema of his youth. He means it also to show the reviving power of art and illustrates this chiefly through the protagonist’s enthusiasm for twentieth-century poetry. When Norman is stuck on a crossword clue ‘The cruellest month’, Hilary supplies ‘April’ instantly (and bleakly). Her bizarre performance at the Chariots of Fire premiere climaxes with recital of the closing lines of Auden’s ‘Death’s Echo’, culminating in ‘Dance, dance, dance till you drop’. She gives to Stephen as a parting gift Larkin’s High Windows. He opens the book on his train journey to Bristol and the film ends with Olivia Colman’s voice reading ‘The Trees’. It’s a clever choice of poem: the hopeful concluding sentiment – ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’ – contradicts both the start of ‘The Waste Land’ and, through the repeated word in the line, the end of ‘Death’s Echo’. Hilary’s discovery of hope beyond despair through cinema is, alas, much less persuasively managed. In the early stages, it’s made repeatedly clear but never explained why, in spite of her job, she makes a point of not watching films that the Empire is showing. The reason, needless to say, is that she must have a Damascene conversion in the last minutes of the story. On the road to recovery from her latest breakdown, Hilary sees the light when Norman gives her a private screening of Being There (1979). It’s not just because Hal Ashby’s film is no kind of spirits-raiser that this moment feels forced and phony.
12 October 2022