Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso is an ode to movies. Written and directed by the Sicilian, the film that was partly inspired by his upbringing in a close-knit, quintessentially Italian community is a true, heartfelt love letter to cinema. Like his Italian filmmaking counterpart, Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, was loosely based on his own experiences during his formative years, promised to achieve a comparable feat to that of its Academy Award-winning contemporary.
Boasting two-time Best Actress Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, and 2010 Best Actor winner Colin Firth, as well as the highly-esteemed cinematic minds of Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins, Empire of Light’s release was understandably an anticipated event of the 2022 film calendar.
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Dubbed a love letter to cinema, Mendes’ new film that follows his last directorial-outing, the Golden Globe-winning 1917, disappointingly received a flat critical reception at the Golden Globes this time around, in receipt of just a singular nomination, a paltry return considering the promise. After the critics’ underwhelming evaluation of the film’s credentials, what is it about Empire of Light that seems to have made it a total misfire?
What Is Empire of Light About?
Searchlight Pictures
Empire of Light is set at the dawn of the ’80s in Margate, a coastal town of Kent, England. Colman plays Hilary Small, a middle-management woman at the Empire Cinema who is struggling with schizophrenia and loneliness. She develops a relationship with the newly hired Stephen (played by Michael Ward), a younger Black man, but racism and resentments rear their ugly head when news of this affair gets out.
A Thematic Mishmash
Empire of Light is a film that’s sadly less than the sum of its parts. Narratively multiplex, the concoction of strands simply doesn’t harmonize, and thus we are left with an off-key choir, all singing from different hymn sheets. Set against the bleak canvas of 1980-81 southern England, issues of mental health, racism, and hardline Thatcherism are Mendes’ choices of topic. Choices that ultimately prove to be rather problematic, and perhaps aren’t conducive to a streamlined and coherent screenplay, or at least not in Mendes’ first script solely credited to himself.
The film fails to connect the dots, venturing down would-be interesting avenues only to get two houses in and then turn around, vaguely touching upon important attributes that make the characters who they are. In particular, Hilary’s childhood trauma and apparent disdain for men are seemingly a key reason behind her psychological disorder, but other than a few ambiguous rage-fueled slurs, we never really get a full comprehension.
The Powerless Nature of Cinema
Much was made of the power of cinema during the film’s build-up. Its unifying qualities, its powers of healing, and the escapism it provides. This is epitomized by the sporadic words of sentiment from the film’s projectionist character, Norman (Toby Jones), on the magic of 24 frames per second give static imagery the impression it’s alive. Other than the fact that Empire of Light is set in a cinema, film itself always seems to be an afterthought.
The addition of this neglected narrative prop seems hollow, and merely utilized superficially as a means to gift Empire of Light some artistic credibility. Furthermore, it appears to be massively out of place, outweighed by the social issues at hand. Stephen is persistently subjected to racial abuse, whether it be through the taunts of white-supremacist skinhead thugs in the seaside town, or slightly more covert forms in the cinema’s foyer from an old, white, cinema-going regular.
The idea that attending a movie is either unifying or healing is a little preposterous when confronting such serious issues. The same can be said for Hilary’s schizophrenia, whose colleagues constantly beckon her to take some timeout from her busy work life and watch a film as if somehow, that is going to be the answer to her life’s issues.
Colman and Deakins: Empire of Light’s Redemptive Qualities
Searchlight Pictures
Empire of Light isn’t all just a one-dimensional shade of unfading gray. There are real moments of color. Unsurprisingly, Olivia Colman is one such life-giving facet. Colman’s portrayal of Hilary escalates, beginning with the wearisome, disconsolate, and melancholic lithium-induced state, where she describes the “numbness” of her condition to a box-ticking doctor; she becomes someone of an unpredictable, volatile, and distressed disposition, incapacitated by an irrepressible schizophrenic episode. Colman brings such grace and humanity to the role, that the film is arguably unworthy of her talents.
Roger Deakins’ abilities as a cinematographer is simply astounding, and he earns the moniker of a “Master of Light.” A regular Mendes’ collaborator, with the pair combining on previous projects in Skyfall and 1917, his cinematography always brings a real air of balance. His photography style is never too complex or pretentious. The beauty of his high-contrast framing lies in its simplicity; he allows the picture to speak for itself, rather than attempting to speak for the picture as such.
With the distinctive use of the wide-angle lens, the revealing establishing shots, as well as the prominent use of silhouette and reflection, he captures the character’s relatively inconsequential existences set against the backdrop of the art-deco cinema, and the lifelessness of a traditional 1980s English coastal town. As with any dexterous cinematographer, he locates the beauty among the brutalist brick. While the “Master of Light” beams brightly, Empire of Light fades drearily.
