Written and directed by Sam Mendes (1917, Skyfall, American Beauty), Empire of Light establishes itself as a confidential character study before blossoming to become many other things: a meditation on the therapeutic power of moviegoing; a recollection of an angry time in Britain that echoes the intolerance of our current era; and a May-December romance that raises provocative questions about race and mental health.
It’s a miracle it all works—and it works wonderfully, thanks mostly to Mendes’ script and his casting of Olivia Colman. Colman plays Hilary, the middle-aged manager of a faded, coastal movie palace in England of the early 1980s. As Hilary goes about her solitary routine—opening the theater alone each day, dining alone each night—Colman’s sad curls and nervous blinking suggest a life teetering on the brink. But then Stephen (Micheal Ward), an aspiring college student, joins the staff as a ticket-taker, bringing with him a gentleness and radiance that Hilary desperately needs. Just when she’s emotionally dying, he arrives fully alive. After tending to an injured pigeon they find together in the theater’s abandoned, top-floor lobby, the pair form a deeper connection that takes on a number of contours as the movie proceeds.
It takes an actor of Colman’s stature to manage such tricky territory. Without a concern for audience sympathy, she fearlessly reveals Hilary to be prickly and potentially damaging—an emotional time bomb that even Stephen’s kindness might not be able to defuse. An Oscar winner for The Favourite, Colman gets her Oscar moment during that explosion, but it’s one only she could likely pull off. (Let’s just say it involves adding a few f bombs to Shakespeare.) In working with an actor like Colman, Mendes essentially has a cowriter—her fingerprints are that evident on the movie.
The same could be said of Ward, despite his comparable lack of experience (you may remember him among the ensemble of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock). For reasons I won’t reveal, the narrative shifts in the film’s last third from Hilary to Stephen, where Ward becomes more than the sunny supporting player and gets to evoke the dismay and challenge of being a young Black man in this time and place. Stephen’s story comes to matter to the movie just as much as Hilary’s, which makes Empire of Light that rare thing: a white, male filmmaker’s intimate portrayal of others’ personal experiences.
(12/5/2022)
