Empire of Light. (MA15+, 199 minutes)
3 stars
Sam Mendes makes stunning films.
From his big screen debut in 1999's Oscar-winning American Beauty, to gangster drama Road to Perdition, Daniel Craig's best Bond outing Skyfall and the sweeping, epic war piece 1917, Mendes knows how to craft a great movie.
He always elicits stellar performances and his films always look prestige.
All of these things are present in his latest effort, Empire of Light, but somehow all the solid portions make for a whole that doesn't exactly hold together as well as it should.
The film follows Hilary (Olivia Colman, The Favourite), the duty manager at a seaside cinema in the south-west of England in the early 1980s.
She's depressed, lonely and has nothing much to fill her life. She's carrying on a joyless affair with the married manager, Donald (Colin Firth, The King's Speech), and engages little with the other employees at the cinema.
But things start to change when new hire Stephen (Micheal Ward, Small Axe) arrives on the scene.
He's young, charismatic and takes the time to engage with Hilary, showing her attention she's not received in a long time.
They soon develop a friendship and more, which grows into something akin to co-dependence on Hilary's side, despite the 20-odd years between them.
Empire of Light is a character piece, so there's not a great deal of plot to propel the story forward.
Colman is exceptional as Hilary. She oscillates between a deep, heavy sadness, to moments of unbridled joy and fierce bouts of anger. You can see her desperation, in her more present moments, to protect her dignity and her fragile, fraying emotional state.
The Oscar-winning actress does a remarkable job portraying the intricacies of mental illness and it can be heartbreaking and anxiety-inducing to watch her at times.
Stephen is Hilary's opposite - upbeat, caring, involved, social. In one of the pair's first interactions, Stephen finds a pigeon with a broken wing and goes to great lengths to nurture and care for it until it's ready to fly freely on its own - a rather obvious parallel to his role in Hilary's life.
It's with the character of Stephen that the film moves dangerously close to the "Magical Negro" trope - a support character who selflessly makes life better for the white folk around him. What maybe saves Stephen from this stereotype is the focus on his own struggles with racism and the burgeoning skinhead culture growing in town at the time.
If Empire of Light was truly a film with two equal leads in Hilary and Stephen, it would probably be more successful on the whole. But by making Hilary the true lead, there's an imbalance in the portrayal of their experiences.
In addition to mental illness and racism, the film also tries to be a love letter to the healing powers of film, and the beauty that can be found in the cinema experience. Toby Jones plays Norman, the prickly film projectionist, and his love for the craft is infectious. But this story thread is perhaps just one too many, and doesn't gel as well with the other more serious themes. The magic of cinema is explored more successfully in The Fabelmans and Babylon this awards season.
All that said, Empire of Light is shot beautifully by renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins (who won an Oscar for his previous work with Mendes on 1917) - a rooftop viewing of fireworks is a stand-out moment - and is soundtracked by a lovely, gentle score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
