14/10/2022 - British film and theatre director Sam Mendes’ latest is a love letter to “the magic of the movies” and the ways we used to consume them, whilst itself being a poor advertisement for the same

In 1980, the year Empire of Light [+see also:
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Empire of Light, written and directed by Sam Mendes (whose career, following Skyfall [+see also:
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making of
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Mendes’ screenplay – his first solo credit – gets into further trouble as it tries to fold in other issues of contemporary import, although it commences from a valid starting point, in imagining in detail the kind of drama that might unfold amongst a cinema workforce. He binds together young people taking on one of their first permanent jobs with those in management positions, from the proud, if snobby, projectionist Norman (Toby Jones), whose skill binding the reels and timing the changeovers is depicted as a lost art, to the rumpled, sexually abusive manager Mr Ellis (Colin Firth), who finds his Thatcherite-aspirational dreams fulfilled when he lands a regional premiere of Chariots of Fire over the dominant UK-wide Odeon chain. Yet the film’s principal characters, duty manager Hilary (the great Olivia Colman) and her black colleague and later lover Stephen (Micheal Ward, last seen in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock), feel devised to stand in for and encapsulate complex ongoing discussions about mental illness and racial discrimination; rather than appearing timely, these characterisations are somewhat shoehorned in, as if Mendes were trying to intuit the present audience’s appetite for these themes, rather than integrate them naturally into his writing.

As said above, there are some on-point wage slave details here: the front-of-house staff’s diplomatic attempts to force a patron to discard his pre-bought food is just one well-observed piece of direction from Mendes, full of the consummately British comedy of social humiliation. But when the movies have provided so many indelible sequences of movie-theatre attendance – from Anna Karina’s Falconetti-aping tears in Vivre Sa Vie to the climax of Inglourious Basterds [+see also:
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Empire of Light is a UK-US production staged by Neal Street Productions and Searchlight Pictures. The latter, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, is also the international sales agent.