115 min | R | December 9, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
A faded seaside cinema in early-1980s England. A lonely manager and a young usher build something fragile while the National Front marches outside. Sam Mendes wants to make four movies at once and finishes none of them.
The Empire is a grand old movie palace on the English coast in the early 1980s. Hilary manages the place. She takes lithium, services her married boss in his office without pleasure, and moves through her days behind a mask of competence. Stephen arrives as a new usher and the two of them carve out a private world in the cinema’s shuttered upper floors. Sam Mendes wants this to be a film about mental illness, an interracial romance, the rise of Thatcher-era racism, and the healing magic of the movies. It is about all of those things and commits to none of them.
Olivia Colman plays Hilary with a control that keeps cracking at the edges. She shows you the effort it takes to hold a face together. When her illness breaks loose, Colman plays the mania as exhilaration and shame at once, and the performance never asks for sympathy. Micheal Ward plays Stephen with warmth and guarded patience, a young Black man who reads every room before he enters it. Toby Jones plays Norman the projectionist as the film’s one voice of uncomplicated love for cinema. Colin Firth plays Donald Ellis, the manager, as a small man who mistakes power for charm.
Mendes directs from his own screenplay and the two jobs work against each other. Roger Deakins shoots the Empire in amber lobby light and cold coastal grey, and the contrast does more emotional work than the script does. Deakins finds beauty in the dead pigeons in the closed wing and the dust hanging in the projector beam. The images promise a depth the writing keeps refusing to supply. Mendes stages a racist beating and a manic collapse with the same handsome restraint, and the polish flattens both. The film looks like a memory and reads like an outline.
Empire of Light has a great actor, a great cinematographer, and no idea what it is. Every theme it raises deserves its own movie. Instead they sit beside each other and dilute one another until the romance carries weight it cannot bear. Mendes reaches for a love letter to the movies and writes a list of subjects instead. The craft is real and present in every frame. The film underneath it never arrives.