Every director has to go back to their past apparently. Empire of Light is another one I wish didn’t Sam Mendes, I love a lot of what you make. I suggest sticking to war movies sir, and I hope you got whatever personal stuff you had going on about your childhood off your chest so you can move on and realize you’ve still probably made the best James Bond movie.
Mendes’s past starts in the 1980s in a small English town, which has the Empire theater where everyone goes to watch movies. Run by Donald Ellis (Colin Firth), the movie theater is a host to a menagerie of workers, including budding manager Neil (Tom Brooke), 80’s punk rocker Janine (Hannah Onslow), projectionist Norman (Toby Jones), and all around glue person Hilary (Olivia Colman). One day, the theater gets a new hire, Stephen (Micheal Ward): a lovely, spirited young man right around Janine’s age. And yet, Hilary finds herself enamored with him, as Stephen spends more time with her.
I see Mendes’s pitch sorta here: instead of the “magic of the movies” we get the “magic of the movie theater” itself. A few of the ragtag characters totally work. I personally would have preferred the Toby Jones centric version of this movie: he’s got amazing monologues that give the movie a magic it lacks in its other sections, as younglings like Stephen learn from under his veteran leadership. Olivia Colman can’t help from being great either, trying her hardest to make Hilary’s complications try to mean something important. There’s potential in seeing the movie theater workers grow up with/build their lives around/move on from the Empire Theater that Sam Mendes’s script really wants the audience to take away from Empire of Light.
The problem is, the movie we get is either clunky or straight up icky garbage. I’m pretty sure Mendes had this script finished by American Beauty’s time and never updated it, leaving a host of bad casting choices and plot devices in its wake. I think I said “Huh…” or, “Really dude?” more than a few times with some of the writer/director’s bold moves in the first hour. Why Colin Firth agreed to this movie I’ll never understand unless I see the paycheck. While writing his story, Mendes tries to cram in the cultural and political sentiments of the time and tie them to his characters, but the execution is so haphazard Empire of Light just ends up being a story that randomly jumps from one scene to the next with zero narrative momentum. Like someone’s memories…say, his? Boy is Sam Mendes his own worst unreliable narrator.
Though I would love to go see a movie in the Empire theater, I’ll give Sam Mendes that. The tingles I got watching a great film in an old school movie theater are the same feelings I get when I go to The Music Box in Chicago. Empire of Light is Sam Mendes’s wave of nostalgia that comforts him, so I guess I’ll let this one slide. As long, Sam, as you promise to up and bring it with something great like 1917 next time.