Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
Out of all the mediocre melodramas that Sam Mendes has released throughout his quarter-century as a filmmaker, Empire of Light might very well be his most decent. American Beauty has aged like a long-forgotten bottle of milk in the back of one’s fridge, its carton swollen and ready to burst from fermentation and rot, and both Jarhead and Revolutionary Road faded into the middle of the middlebrow pack once their relevance as pseudo-polemics and in-the-moment star vehicles dissipated. Action has always seemed to be his saving grace: Road to Perdition remains a well-executed gangster bildungsroman, and his Bond output, at the very least, had its fair share of brilliantly-shot sequences, thanks in no small part to the work of Roger Deakins, whose cinematography for Skyfall remains some of the best the franchise has ever seen. It makes sense, in a way, that after a big undertaking like 1917 (which retrospectively feels like a challenge issued by the director to Deakins over a few pints), the pair would reunite for something much smaller in ambition, and Empire of Light provides its cinematographer with plenty of understated beauty to feast on. If one could simply watch its landscapes and portraits set to the gorgeous score that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have crafted, it’d be hard to argue with anyone claiming it was Mendes’ best film. But the director also wrote it, and it’s the story that proves to be the Achilles’ heel, with his memories of seaside towns that some forgot to burn down and racial strife and early ’80s moviegoing acting as Paris, bow drawn and at the ready to undermine those very lovely images and the impeccable work done by his cast.
Empire of Light, thankfully, doesn’t go the Roma route, where the director draws from and depicts his own life story as a way to explain a love of film and moviegoing (see Spielberg for a great example of how to do that right). Instead, it’s a sort of milquetoast Oscar-bait version of Annie Baker’s The Flick, an endurance Off-Broadway piece that accurately documented the drudgery and drama of your average movie theater staff over three long hours. But, then again, these aren’t just “normal” slice-of-life folks: rather, they’re the employees of the Empire theater, who are a collection of recognizable coastal stereotypes semi-estranged from our lead, Hilary (Olivia Colman). She’s the assistant manager at the theater and deeply loves her work, even though she’s not the type to ever consider sneaking in and watching a minute of the films she’s tearing tickets to and selling popcorn for. She lives a very mundane existence, aside from her flings with her married boss (Colin Firth), who is as pathetic as he is cruel, and is recovering from a stay in a mental hospital. Lithium seems to be sucking the life out of her, until a new employee, Stephen (Micheal Lind), is hired, and she falls head-over-heels for him after a brief bout of skepticism. He’s astonishingly kind, caring for a wounded pigeon they find in the long-closed upper theaters, charismatic, and genuinely likes spending time with Hilary. Of course, being the son of Jamaican immigrants at the height of English skinhead culture, he’s a target for all of the town’s worst elements and suffers many indignities for the simple fact of his skin color. But his outings with Hilary act as an escape from his troubles, at least until it becomes clear that her mental state is on the less-solid ground than she thinks.
Colman and Lind’s affability goes a long way towards making Empire of Light work on a moment-to-moment basis, with her shifting moods mirroring the audience as he enters her life, and the creeping dread that comes as she slowly starts to lose control. When she does, it’s spectacular, in the tragicomic way that only a skilled performer like Colman can do, given that she’s an equally accomplished comedian and a dramatic lead. The scene in which she does fully self-destruct, which comes at a well-attended premiere for a film wisely chosen to perfectly complement the place and time, is perhaps the best single scene Mendes has directed since the Bond films. It’s awkward and painful to watch yet incredibly funny: The humor is given a bit of a bitter aftertaste by our protagonist’s mental state, but it also frees her to say and do things that we all know she needs to move on. It’s only in the next scene that the bill comes due, which is gently horrifying and captivating. Deakins captures her lit from below, like a paranoid Virgin Mary in a ratty apartment whose walls are covered in scribbles, and his work, paired with Colman’s commitment to her character, helps elevate Mendes’ writing, which leans on pretty stereotypical portrayals of mental illness for its content. The ultimate resolution of the film is sweet enough, but it ends as you might expect from a movie absolutely chomping at the bit to pay homage to the moving power of cinema or whatever. It’s mawkish and lazy in the way that leaning on clips from other films to get your catharsis can be, but part of me wants to give Mendes kudos for holding out that fucking long with all of that. Movies typically act as inciting incidents and catharsis (think Cinema Paradiso) in these films, so it’s strangely refreshing to see it play out a bit differently, even if it kind of sucks.
Yet, again, I still can’t stop thinking about how lovely this film is to look at. Deakins remains one of the world’s best at replicating the softness of light captured on celluloid on digital, and he squeezes every ounce of color and clarity from his locales. The theater itself is lovingly captured with its bright and colorful interiors overwhelming the frame, and there’s so much sweet detail in the projection booth (complete with an affable grump, played by Toby Jones, manning the reel-to-reel) that one could probably spend an hour or so looking at it and still find new details. But it’s the landscapes that prove to be the most moving: a New Years’ fireworks display, witnessed by Colman and Lind on the rooftop of the Empire, lit only by the theater’s golden accent lighting and the bursts of color each rocket emits; or a standing pool in which the characters skip rocks, seemingly blending with the sky at the end of the horizon. When accompanied by that Reznor and Ross score and its understated synth hums and single piano notes, Empire of Light is the kind of movie I think Mendes set out to make: an accurate yet stylized representation of what coastal England might have felt like to a kid who only saw the colors and the warm lights and the waves and the wonder that projected still images in sequence could tell us stories and move us just like the pictures. But then a character emerges to tell us exactly what we’re feeling and how, and we’re swept back into a struggling domestic drama only held up by its two leads’ seemingly endless supply of charm. Sometimes magic is just magic, and even if, as Carl Sagan once said, knowing a little bit about a sunset doesn’t spoil its majesty, I’m sure if he’d had that quote thrown back at him every ten minutes for two hours, he’d probably find his vibe just a little harshed.