Direction: Sam Mendes
Country: UK / USA
In Sam Mendes’ romantic drama, Empire of Light, we are transported to a coastal English town in the early 1980’s, where an old-fashioned cinema employs two outcasts with complicated pasts: Hilary Small (Olivia Colman), a duty manager struggling with mental illness, and Stephen (Michael Ward), a black young man originally from Trinidad who endures systematic racism.
This is a well-intentioned, sometimes awkward effort that is hard to emotionally embrace in full. The director of Road to Perdition (2002) and 1917 (2019) handles the story with sobriety and pathos, but almost never manages to touch us. Not being particularly romantic and living from embarrassing situations, the film tells us how love and friendship can become an oasis in a cruel and violent world.
The film is passable just because of another outstanding performance by Colman (The Favourite, 2018; The Lost Daughter, 2021), who puts up a frank smile and a depressive facial expression with the same disconcerting charm. Looking like a young Sidney Poitier, Ward (Small Axe: Lovers Rock, 2020) is not bad, whereas the incredible Toby Jones (Berberian Sound Studio, 2012) as a veteran projectionist, and the self-assured Colin Firth (A Single Man, 2009; The King’s Speech, 2010) as the cinema’s general manager, weren’t given enough space to shine.
There are a few lovely things in this film that make it easier for us to forgive its shortcomings. But so you know, Empire of Light is no magic movie.
