Director Sam Mendes' love letter to the moviegoing experience, Empire of Light, has some beautiful moments, but sadly falls short of excellence.
Set in a seaside English town in the early 1980s, Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a middle-aged employee at a fading old-school movie palace. She strikes up an unlikely friendship that turns into romance with Stephen, a Black usher in his early 20s.
Empire of Light is at its best when dealing with the ins and outs of working in a movie theater. The moments and conversations in these scenes feel authentic. As a former theater employee, I can tell you employees definitely do talk about things like "What was the weirdest thing you ever found cleaning an auditorium?" Mendes is a skilled visual filmmaker, and he is once again working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, my pick for the best living cinematographer (Mendes and Deakins most recently collaborated on 1917). As a result, Empire of Light is often quite beautiful to look at.
But for the film to fully work, the central romance/relationship between Hilary and Stephen needs to viscerally connect with audiences and it failed to do so for me. Sometimes it's easy as a critic to point out why a film didn't work - the dialogue's bad, the ending's inappropriate, the performances are off key, the tone is all over the place, there are massive plot holes. Here, the failing isn't mechanical, it's visceral/emotional, and it's a lot harder to understand why a film comes up short for a viewer in that regard.
Steven Spielberg's new film The Fabelmans worked simultaneously as a love letter to moviemaking/moviegoing and as a touching examination of familial love. Empire of Light gets the love letter to movies/movie theaters part right, but whiffs on the central romance.
I'm a passionate advocate of the theatrical experience. I will never understand why so many people seem so content to never leave their homes, especially since the early weeks of the pandemic clearly illustrated for me how miserable life is when you stay home all the time. So I really, really wanted to love Empire of Light but I can only give it a mixed review.
