Chapter 2 of ‘Olivia Colman Goes Nuts in a Cinema’. I loved Olivia Colman’s performance with all my heart in The Lost Daughter early last year, and she’s backing it up on the silver screen with another distant characterisation in Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. This movie is such a so very strange transition for Mendes, I reckon – after technically trailblazing with 1917, action movies Skyfall and SPECTRE, and expertise in award-winning dark comedies like American Beauty, this is basically a straight drama, with a dash of romance thrown in. But, variety is the spice of life, they say…
Hilary Small (Olivia Colman) is a withdrawn and depressed ticket manager at the rundown Empire Cinema, at the turn of 1981. When twenty-something Stephen (Michael Ward) starts work at the cinema, he brings a fresh energy, capturing the attention of the younger sales assistant and Hilary as well, although Hilary is certain she would have no chance. But an unexpected kiss begins Hilary and Stephen on a passionate secret relationship, where each partner aids the other in debilitating tensions – overt racist vilification for Stephen, and past disturbances for Hilary. Stephen helps Hilary come back out of her shell, but there’s to be a few bumpy predicaments along the way.
The first third of Empire of Light almost tiptoes into being an aging person’s whimsy or fantasy, and after Good Luck to You, Leo Grande dissected a similar age dynamic like a frog in a lab, I worried for this movie becoming melodramatic. But thankfully, it avoids it, and Empire of Light had much bigger shots to shoot, far outside the predictive capabilities of my pedestrian mind. This movie is really weird in the way it moves, and the story flips around like those eye-catching everchanging screensavers that make geometric shapes; characters come to the foreground out of nowhere, and I’m especially writing about Neil (Tom Brooke), who struck me as a simple fellow in the beginning, before turning into an insightful empath, and then a kind’ve hero boss who hires Hilary back, appreciating her worth despite complications. Stephen also takes over as the main character through the middle of the movie when Hilary has to go to hospital. But for what often wants to become a romantic tale, the movie contains two really sharp emotional spikes to challenge, that were super effective on me. One, is when Hilary gets up to speak on stage at the Chariots of Fire’s premier night, that was so awkward to watch, I was wriggling in my seat. Similarly powerful, is when rioters break into the cinema, resulting in Stephen having to go to emergency – that scene had me sickened to my stomach for probably five minutes thereafter, well into the following fourth or fifth scenes at least, if only to prove my investment in Stephen as a character. I don’t know, man – hug a black friend today, for ever in their lives or ancestry having to put up with the threat of assault just for the way they look, while trying to piece a life together like the rest of us. What a horrid way to lose someone you love, it would be 😢 After Hilary’s really vivid fit in her darkened home with writing on the walls, the movie once again returns to a shot of the cinema’s second story loft, which made me recoil in thinking, ‘oh yeah, this movie used to be about sex and healing pigeons’ – it’d been a while since the movie’s events felt so breezy.
But Empire of Light’s most glorious point is the way it’s shot – it looks mighty fantastic, taking full advantage of the old cinema setting and the outside aesthetic of eighties England. I think the warmth and beauty that come through the set design really work to juxtapose the horrors and violence that come later on. This may be the first time I’m mentioning Empire of Light’s cinematographer, Roger Deakins, on my website, but I see you out there, and I’m aware of the fervent accurate praise that always follows you 👍 The movie’s characters are also well-regarded, including Colin Firth’s Donald Ellis, and without being an enthusiastic people, the cinema’s staff seem the type of lived-in colleagues you’d love to have, but excluding Mr. Ellis this time of course, nasty piggish man. Wouldn’t it be great to sit down with Olivia Colman and listen to how she planned out this character in her head, and constructed her performance? Because, in The Lost Daughter, I feel like Olivia Colman played a character that was equally reserved and distant, but eventually revealed herself to be who she was, where I think a lot of Hilary still remains an enigma. Or maybe it wouldn’t – maybe a bit of mystery is rich enough. Hilary and Stephen can seem at service to the plot sometimes, and I think the main takeaway of this movie seems to be about rebirth and nurturing love overriding tangible threats like tyrannical bosses, childhood trauma, race riots or a perceptive age gap. Most recently, Steven Spielberg and Damien Chazelle have done it, and this seems to be Mendes’ ode to cinema as well, with a lesson on the emotional catharsis of cinema thrown in to accompany this love story stranger than The Big Sick. It was a great pleasure to sit in session with Toby Jones and Olivia Colman in those final moments too.
3.5
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