Empire of Light (2022)
In a fading movie palace in early '80s England, hearts and bodies get their closeups
Empire of Light (2022)
Roger Deakins’ shimmering cinematography permeates Empire of Light
Nothing propels a movie as surely as a tough subject. Except perhaps two tough subjects, and watching them collide.
That’s what happens in the searing, achingly beautiful Empire of Light, from writer-director Sam Mendes (1917).
He’s said that his script, set on the South British coast in 1980-81, draws on his own mother’s struggles with mental illness, and the movie’s focus on its protagonist Hilary (Olivia Colman) can feel alarmingly personal.
From the start, the story isn’t merely intimate. It takes us deep into the tormented Hilary’s psyche.
Hilary is the crew boss of the mostly young, all-white staff of misfits and dreamers who oversee The Empire, a tall, once-elegant, now down-on-its-heels Art Deco movie palace.
The staffers are lively, and make the place run efficiently. Showing movies seems to give them a lift, even a touch of pride. But Hilary never watches the movies, saying she’s too busy up front selling snacks and tallying box office receipts.
In her mid-40s, without a family or close friends, Hilary tells her doctor that she often feels “numb”. He prescribes the antidepressant Lithium. Which only adds another chilling layer to the numbness.
So despondent is Hilary that she’s succumbed to the sexual demands of Donald (Colin Firth), The Empire’s imperious manager. Neither shows any affection in their sweatily desperate encounters. You wonder: Is Hilary sick of being used? Or, worse, is being used deepening her depression?
Change comes with the hiring of a handsome young Black man, Stephen (Micheal Ward), whose lustrous skin tone itself brings something disturbing into this all-white enclave (even the patrons seem to be mostly white).
He’s warmly welcomed by all his co-workers as the new ticket taker, but his color and very presence inevitably bring to the surface Britain’s simmering racial tensions.
That The Empire has seen better, more glorious days is underscored when Hilary shows Stephen the two additional theaters and the once-opulent lounge above, all now shuttered, filled with dust and cooing pigeons.
For reasons Hilary doesn’t understand, on the roof, seconds after 1981 has been rung in, she kisses Stephen. They’re both heady with champagne. He reluctantly kisses her back. She flees.
Stephen and Hilary imagining the long-lost glory of The Empire’s upper floors
Next day he reassures her it wasn’t a big deal, and to the surprise of both they begin a fleeting sexual dalliance.
And she stops taking Lithium. Elated, off her meds and basking in her re-awakened sensuality, she suddenly, publicly exposes and denounces the manipulative Donald, loses her job and spirals downward into clinical depression.
Yet she finds her way back to “normalcy”. When she recovers, she’s rehired at The Empire (Donald has moved to another city). She and Stephen stay at wary remove from one another, but still need to figure out what they mean to one another.
One day, out of nowhere, roving, motorcycled, scootered gangs of skinheads stream past The Empire, shouting racist vitriol. The staff locks the glass doors, but when skinheads who’d earlier hassled Stephen recognize him through the glass, they break in and their cohort follows.
The mob trashes the theater and viciously beats Stephen. Fortunately, he survives in hospital.
All along, the catatonic Hilary has been less than conscious of the racial troubles roiling Margaret Thatcher’s England. She’s not even aware of the violent encounters between police and Black residents in London’s Brixton in April 1981, the largest such disturbance in the country’s history.
She knows that a physical relationship with Stephen crosses a racial line, but she can’t see beyond her own need for solace.
This blindness of Hilary’s has struck many reviewers as an outrageous defect in Mendes’ script. They suggest that he – naive, manipulative or just tone deaf – pictures an interracial relationship as some sort of bellwether for racial harmony.
A similar charge was brought against Green Book (2018). That movie, too, it was suggested, offered the absurd proposition that two individuals could “cure” racism.
Nonsense. Overcoming it, if only provisionally, between two people, was the idea. The detractors were wrong about Green Book, which never made any society-wide claims for itself, and Mendes isn’t doing any such thing here.
This accusation that Empire of Light “softens” racism I think refuses to look at Hilary’s long standing psychological wounds. Her lack of racial consciousness is entirely believable, as it could be for any woman so deeply disturbed.
Those vilifying this movie don’t seem to realize how completely despair can cut one off from hope.
Hilary believes she can’t be helped. By anyone. Not her doctor, not Stephen, not social welfare, which temporarily drags her off to several weeks’ hospital confinement. When she’s released, she’s back to square one, unsure of how to start over.
The reason Hilary doesn’t watch the movies at The Empire is a sad one. It’s because she’s lost the capacity to let in wonder, trust – enlightenment, if you will – from anywhere.
It’s not uncommon for a depressive to do exactly what Hilary does when she’s at her most forlorn.
Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins achieve a delicacy in shooting and performance that I found rapturous.
Every space, every room, has all the light it needs but not a flicker more. It almost hurts how intensively Deakins pictures emotions, charged with light, spilling across the screen.
During her breakdown, she retreats to her apartment, closes the drapes, turns out most of the lights and begins scrawling on her walls bleak messages riddled with rage (as Mendes has said his mother did when she was at her lowest).
This need for light, for letting it in, is the movie’s actual theme, and it’s attached to society’s abiding, implacable racial divide. The way these two forces smash up here is unpredictable, but entirely plausible.
Stephen, fortunately, can let in light, can even let in Hilary. But he also understands the difference between what he can allow in and what he needs to envision – without the aid of light, i.e., in his imagination – to move his life forward.
Though young, he can see reality clearly. Hilary, older, is constantly re-learning how to see reality at all.
That’s why light in this movie has dominion and packs such visual power. It’s not because Mendes naively dwells on, or hungers for, the movie past.
It’s because in life, darkness isn’t evenly parceled out. Some of us live more in the shade than others. And the line between light and darkness can shift and temporarily throw any of us off course or out of reach.
A darkened movie theater seems to make us equals. But that’s a two-hour illusion.
How that benign deception is foisted on us is beautifully explained by The Empire’s projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones, in a heartfelt performance).
Norman finds in Stephen a willing student of the way movie light is projected, how heavy the equipment is, how fleeting the onscreen images.
Norman (Toby Jones) and Stephen (Micheal Ward) under a movie projector’s spell
We also see the motes swirling in the projector’s light. Nothing is perfect.
Mendes isn’t romanticizing movies or trying to re-invigorate them in our minds with some lost or forgotten “magic”. Movies don’t save anybody from anything.
All they can do, he seems to be saying, is pull us briefly into the dark only to push us peremptorily back out into the light, where dreams are or aren’t, can or can’t be, realized.
What’s most impressive about Empire of Light is its majestic, piercingly, precisely lit, yet somehow almost entirely humdrum, evocation of place, not just in The Empire, but in Hilary’s apartment, and on a jaunt she and Stephen take to a beach.
Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have worked together on a larger scale, but here against a more intimate backdrop, the two achieve a delicacy in shooting and performance that I found rapturous.
You simply can’t picture light falling across a face any more accurately than Deakins manages to show it here.
Every space, every room, has all the light it needs but not a flicker more. It almost hurts how intensively he pictures emotions, charged with light, spilling across the screen.
Similarly, Colman gets the overwhelming despondency of Hilary just right, because in every shot she never leaves out a glimmer of anticipation – hope that she’ll be understood – from Hilary’s face, her yearning eyes.
Ward, too, is mesmerizing, with eyes so alert and farsighted you almost forget Stephen’s youth. Ward acts intuitively, yet we take the deepest pleasure in his startling authority, his unflinching fearlessness before the camera.
Working with the gifted Deakins, Mendes has created in The Empire a sense of place not in order to evoke nostalgia, but to give pleasure and pain a living, thriving locus – that is, an exact spot – that can, yes, suddenly turn harsh, even violent. Not unlike Hilary’s mind, another exact spot.
When the mob storms The Empire’s lobby, we feel the terrifying violation. That’s how we know Mendes and Deakins have created a world – not a cocoon or a sanctuary.
But movies go on, this movie reminds us. Including the showing of them. Matinee after matinee, night after night, light is again projected through darkness.
Movies can give us not just a chance to disappear into a movie palace’s darkness. But also, maybe a bit of courage to step out from it into the light of day.