EMPIRE OF LIGHT directed by Sam Mendes (UK, 2022)
I’m trying to imagine Sam Mendes’ pitch to the producers for this movie.
It’s about coming to terms with ageing, loneliness, a women with mental health problems, sexual harassment at the workplace, the state of the British nation in 1980, living with racism, making meaningful life choices and nostalgia for the days when cinemas were seen as dream palaces
A novice director would have been asked to go away and think which story he really wanted to tell. Any one could have made for an interesting story but putting them all together results in what my Italian friend called a minestrone. She didn’t mean it as a compliment!
This is the first film Mendes has both written and directed. His track record as a director based on screenplays by others is impressive but here he is guilty of using far too many ingredients and hoping a tasty dish will be the outcome.
It’s all beautifully filmed by Roger Deakins and the actors do their level best but ultimately it’s clear they have been given more than can chew. The emphasis on gloss and sentiment renders any presentation of moral issues or social questions at best superficial , at worst embarrassingly simplistic.
Olivia Coleman as Hilary Small and Micheal Ward as Stephen make for an unlikely couple – believable as friends but not as lovers. Their relationship and the Empire cinema in Margate where they work exist in a kind of bubble.
It is all so quiet!
This is 1980 but it is as if Covid lockdown regulations were in place. At one point Hilary and Stephen take an empty bus to a deserted beach of the coastal town. In another scene , after Stephen is beaten up by a racist mob his mother, a nurse, seems to be only member of staff in the local hospital.
Where is everybody else?
Perhaps the pandemic meant that the use of extras was problematic. There’s certainly never any danger of social distancing. Details like this matter because they render the improbable plot and questionable characterisation even more far-fetched. Mendes has plenty of theatrical experience and his story might conceivably have made a better stage play albeit without the homage to cinema-going.
With so many spinning plates on the go, there’s a real problem of how to conclude the film. We are presented with a sequence of endings but none can provide a miracle salvation.
Far from being served with a delicious soup, this movie is a dog’s dinner.
