Empire of Light

Grade: B+

For 23 years, I’ve yearned for director Sam Mendes (1917, Spectre, Skyfall, Jarhead, Road to Perdition) to make another simple, darkly comedic character study like he did so successfully with American Beauty, one of my favorite movies. Instead, he has mainly dabbled in war, action, and James Bond. My wish is mostly granted with Empire of Light, opening in theaters today. It’s the closest I’ve seen Mendes return to Beauty territory.

I don’t think I’ve seen a movie this year that has tried harder than Empire of Light. It looks great, sounds great, and contains awesomely powerful scenes. It didn’t always feel like a cohesive unit, but rather a series of amazing bits in search of a movie. Sometimes my biggest takeaway was: they should show that part in a film class as a demonstration of how to construct a really great scene. Empire of Light throws big showy grandstanding ones at us from the beginning, long before these moments are earned.

I picked up on numerous parallels and callbacks to American Beauty, when it came to themes, dramatic beats, or how a scene ended and segued into the next one. Olivia Colman is somebody I become more drawn to each time I see her, and she might be one of the best actresses working today. She has a wonderful smile when we get to see it, in the midst of the restless unhappy characters she plays. Here, she plays Hilary – a cinema manager in a British coastal town in the very early 1980s. I always enjoy getting to know a group of characters with a history and chemistry. Seeing the employees of this two-screen movie house work and banter together is one of the movie’s pleasures. Our other main characters are the movie theater’s owner, Donald (Colin Firth), and new hire Stephen – played by a marvelous Micheal Ward, who holds his own amongst old pros Colman and Firth.

Composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have given us a score that is another master stroke for them. Couple that with the consistent feast for the eyes provided to us courtesy of cinematographer Roger Deakins and the art/set crew, and you’ve got one British beauty of a film, with sights and sounds that can sometimes upstage the main action. The art of film projection is treated as a shimmering metaphor for life, much like golf in The Legend of Bagger Vance or baseball in Field of Dreams.

When a character gives another a gift and says “read it later,” I predicted exactly how and where it would be read, and that it would be the last scene – and I was right. There was a lot that I loved in Empire of Light, and much that I think you will love, too – even if you might find yourself being more drawn to the music and the visuals in the background.

Grade: B+