Empire of Light movie storyline. Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward star in this poignant story about human connection and the magic of cinema, directed by Sam Mendes and captured by cinematographer Roger Deakins.
The Empire is the kind of movie house you don’t see too often anymore, framed by bright lights and a beautiful marquee, graciously inviting all into its red-velvet seats. Hilary (Olivia Colman) serves at the front of house, opening the theatre every morning and overseeing a brimming concession stand. Meanwhile, her manager (Colin Firth) calls her into his office from time to time for illicit favours. It’s a gloomy routine that Hilary grudgingly repeats, but all her co-workers recognize that she’s been a lot quieter since returning to the job after a long absence.
When Stephen (Micheal Ward) arrives as an eager new employee, the two form a quick, if outwardly unlikely, connection. Hilary hides a troubled past, struggling to manage her mental health, while Stephen, a young Black man, grapples with the racism rampant in 1980s Britain. Both wounded by aggressions outside their control, they find an escape and safe harbour in one another — but their relationship, like the Empire cinema itself, cannot last forever, and soon the pair must face the reality of their differing futures.
Ward gives an exceptional performance opposite Colman, who realizes another remarkable character, equal parts sweet and shocking, as a woman filled with emotions that are considered socially inappropriate to express. Master cinematographer Roger Deakins exquisitely photographs the inhabitants of this story, created with great tenderness and compassion by writer-director Sam Mendes, making Empire of Light a love letter to the people who come together under the glow of the cinema, and to the beautiful tales they take away for the rest of their lives.
Empire of Light is a 2022 romantic drama film written and directed by Sam Mendes. The film stars Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Monica Dolan, Tom Brooke, Tanya Moodie, Hannah Onslow, Crystal Clarke, Toby Jones, and Colin Firth. Empire of Light premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 3, 2022, and was theatrically released in the United States on December 9, 2022, and in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2023, by Searchlight Pictures.
Film Review for Empire of Light
fter all the annihilation of his war film, 1917, director Sam Mendes has traveled forward in time, to the troubled early 1980s in England, to tell a humble little tale of human connection. His new film, Empire of Light, is the director’s most delicate, a wistful short story about two people seized by circumstance who help one another find their way through life. It’s an achingly lovely film—the best Mendes has yet made.
Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a retiring singleton who works at a seaside movie palace in small-town coastal England. 1980 is drawing to a close, and a Christmas melancholy fills the air. We watch as Hilary goes about her lonely life, dinners for one and the occasional utilitarian tryst with her married boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth). Something is stirring, though, all of this stasis seeming pregnant with anticipation. That feeling is beautifully rendered in the film’s score, moody dots of piano and ambient hum—the sound of the planet in motion—composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
That quiet excitement and nervousness is answered, in part, by the arrival of a new theater employee, Stephen (Michael Ward), a young man spinning his wheels until he gets into college. Hilary is instantly beguiled. He radiates kindness that wins over the whole staff, but Hilary senses something particularly kindred in him. Both she and Stephen are isolated in this picturesque but chilly town: he because he is Black in a bigoted country, she because of her struggles with mental health, which are gradually revealed as Hilary and Stephen fall into a tenuous romance.
One tenses up when it seems that Empire of Light is headed into the smarmy, didactic territory of a lesson movie. We expect some creaky panacea about race relations, and some stale, issue-of-the-week lecturing about mental health. But Mendes, who wrote the script, skirts hoary cliche (and worse) by staying close to Stephen and Hilary, these portraits of people in flux so finely wrought by Colman and Ward.
Sure, Empire of Light has more than just this one relationship on its mind. The film is a coming-of-age story universal in its consideration of the charged and formative encounters of youth. It’s a gentle encouragement out of the resigned slump of middle age. And it’s a drama about the nasty resurgence of racist nationalism that gripped England at the dawn of Thatcher’s era, and has now surged once again. But those themes don’t overwhelm the soft-spoken thing that Mendes and his actors have built. Empire of Light finds a careful balance—it listens to its characters rather than shouting a message over them.
Also important for a Sam Mendes movie, Empire of Light’s exquisite aesthetics don’t vainly upstage the story. The film looks incredible, with sumptuous cinematography by Roger Deakins and richly textured production design by Mark Tildesley. Those visual graces support and enhance the story rather than drown it out; the same cannot be said of all past Mendes endeavors.
I’m curious where this film came from. After a festival season of big-director memoir pieces, one does wonder if some personal narrative is being retold here. The film doesn’t gesture toward its creator in any easily discernible way, though, so I suppose we should take it on its stated terms. Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.
Viewed from some angles, the film looks rather strange: as Hilary loses her grip on her well being, Empire of Light takes on surprising new dimensions. It’s a shock to see the movie break its dreamy spell, as Colman suddenly turns the volume of her performance way up. Mendes’s calm and steady film stays upright throughout these jarring thrashes—and as Stephen is violently thrashed at—building toward a conclusion of staggering poignance.
Empire of Light’s overarching sentiment is hopeful, but not blinkered. Stephen is heading off into an uncertain future, burdened by other people’s prejudice as he tries to stretch into the fullness of himself. Mendes offers no balm for that, but at least gives Stephen these valuable moments of communion with troubled, yearning Hilary.
In that, these characters escape the miserablism of so much prestige cinema. They’re given simple and profound pleasures to both ease and complicate their pain. Empire of Light could be unfairly read as maudlin (and already has been during its festival run), and it does indeed come close to that line. But Mendes restrains the film before its high feeling—its fugues of poetry, its watery smiles in the face of such sadness—becomes cloying.
What remains is a deep and refreshingly heart-on-its-sleeve compassion, a humbled and awed appreciation for the majesty of learning from another person. In the film, Hilary shows Stephen the theater’s abandoned third floor, once a grand ballroom full of noise and activity now gone silent and used only by pigeons. Seeing this ghostly room, one assumes that, later on in the film, it will be somehow revived. But Mendes lets it stay lost, an emblem of irretrievable time. Still, Hilary and Stephen make it their own for a while, a secret place where anything seems possible as their lives so fleetingly intersect. And then, just past them: the windows, the beach, the sea, the world entire—briefly theirs.
Empire of Light (2022)
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Starring: Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Monica Dolan, Tom Brooke, Tanya Moodie, Hannah Onslow, Crystal Clarke, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Justin Edwards, Sara Stwart, Ron Cook
Screenplay by: Sam Mendes
Production Design by: Mark Tildesley
Cinematography by: Roger Deakins
Film Editing by: Lee Smith
Costume Design by: Alexandra Byrne
Set Decoration by: Philippa Bruges, Kamlan Man
Art Direction by: Neal Callow, Tim Devine, Virginia Reina, Camille M. Verhaeghe
Music by: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and brief violence.
Distributed by: Searchlight Pictures
Release Date: September 3, 2022 (Telluride), December 9, 2022 (United States), January13, 2023 (United Kingdom)
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