Olivia Colman stars again as a neurotic on the verge of collapse.
The coincidence of Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light opening so soon after the British Film Institute’s disastrous Sight and Sound poll confirms that movie culture is no longer the same. It has shifted in the wake of social change. Mendes wrote and directed this story, centered around a local movie theater in the early 1980s, the Empire, that offered low-brow fare The Blues Brothers, All That Jazz, and the upcoming regional premiere of Chariots of Fire. He focuses on Hilary Small (Olivia Colman), the Empire’s “duty manager,” a middle-aged white woman at the end of her tether who takes meds to control her emotional swings.
Hilary’s low self-esteem accounts for her tawdry hook-ups with the Empire’s married manager (Colin Firth). But when a young black West Indian lad, Stephen (Michael Ward) is hired and trained as a theater assistant, Hilary’s attraction to his bright smile changes her desperation to a smile of her own.
A genuine smile is rare for Colman, whose specialty of neurotic, often hostile awkwardness (The Favourite, The Lost Daughter) has made her the Millennium’s most acclaimed British actress. Hilary’s smiles edge into grimaces of trembly emotional collapse; they’re unsettling even when she’s expressing sincere affection for Stephen. Mendes uses Colman’s awkwardness, and the Empire itself, to symbolize — and sentimentalize — Great Britain’s difficult social transformation.
Empire of Light is what trade papers hype as a “passion project.” Mendes, who is celebrated for his work in live theater as well as prestige movies, applies topical social issues to the same affectionate, provincial subject as in the 1957 film The Smallest Show on Earth, about a young British couple who inherit and revive a fading cinema palace. (That’s where he got the surname “Small.”) But surely Mendes is also aware of John Osborne’s late-’50s play The Entertainer, a vehicle for Laurence Olivier as a seedy, ageing music-hall hack still performing as the empire crumbles. Mendes refers to Osborne unsubtly but for prestige — and #MeToo movie significance.
Hilary needs rejuvenation, just as England does. The emphasis on Hilary’s personal travails over Stephen’s career struggles (feminism competes with racism) makes Empire of Light of the moment. The problem is Mendes’s inherent shallowness — he’s the British Mike Nichols. Mendes makes brief mention of Stephen’s fondness for “fast reggae,” the 2 Tone music genre popularized by the Selecter, the Specials, and the Beat — a movement that consciously united England’s black and white youth in ways that the Empire’s film programming does not.
The Empire as a quaint institution seems out of touch (especially when skinhead protesters violently invade the premise, attacking Stephen). But Mendes is also out of touch; he overlooks the anti-monarchist currents of Seventies punk and leftist filmmakers Derek Jarman, Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, and the imminent rise of screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid). Instead, Hilary, Stephen, and the Empire staff sell duff, irrelevant movies. It’s bad enough when Hilary watches Being There for therapeutic relief (relating to Peter Sellers’s depiction of autism, I guess). “It was wonderful! I can’t wait to see it again,” she raves with that verge-of-madness grin.
But worst of all is the scene where the Empire projectionist (Toby Jones) explains the persistence-of-vision principle to Stephen: “Nothing happens without light. It’s static frames with nothing in between. It’s a little flaw in your optic nerve, so that if I run the film at 24 frames per second you don’t see the darkness.”
At least we’re spared a Cinema Paradiso montage. Still, it’s as phony as Kenneth Branagh writing and directing Belfast. Mendes refuses to “see the darkness” of the psychopathic, racist English empire as it meets its inevitable social reckoning. Not even Hilary’s two highbrow quotations from Auden and Philip Larkin can compensate for this maudlin social consciousness. Mendes’s superficial regard for movie history — for art that sheds light — is as unfortunate as the British Film Institute’s.
