Empire of Light - Review

Sam Mendes is a great director who created several of my favourite films including American Beauty, Skyfall, 1917, Road to Perdition and Jarhead. Thus, going into his latest film, Empire of Light, I was expecting at the very least a competent film from a talented filmmaker. Yikes.

It is hard to give a synopsis for a film at war with itself over what it wants to be. Is this a movie about race, mental illness, the death of theatres, marriage, or none of the above. One of the most interesting things I heard someone say while I was at University in a film class was that it is bad to criticize a movie for not being all things. I think this quote applies here as this movie never fully unpacks any of the issues it hastily brings up and instead moves to the next one without adequately addressing any of them. The movie is so convoluted and horribly acted that any technical film making prowess, such as the great cinematography found here, is lost in the shuffle and pushed to the back of the viewers mind. The movie had not totally lost me for the first thirty or so minutes wherein I was impressed with how good the movie looked in terms of the cinematography which had an interesting mix of wide and closer angle shots which helped to direct the viewer toward what their attention should be focused on as opposed to a movie like Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths which insisted on having every single frame of the movie captured on the widest angle lens possible thus creating no separation between different moments in the film. Another thing I thought was well handled in the movie was a moment toward the start of the film where Olivia Coleman is asked a question by her boss, who she is having an affair with (played by Colin Firth) and before she even finishes her answer he quickly cuts her off showing that he does not care for her response and that their relationship is one sided. This subtlety is surely lacking in the rest of the film wherein Olivia Coleman’s character is shown to be suffering from a mental illness and rather than investigate this in a delicate and balanced manner the movie instead resorts to having Coleman overact in increasing fashion scene after scene as the movie progresses which undermined both her performance and the audience’s investment in her character which turned into a poorly drawn caricature. This movie gave me deja vu as it appeared to be some kind of epilogue to Coleman’s horrible performance last year in The Lost Daughter where she again played an unbalanced character in a mess of a film with no coherent structure. It hurts to be so critical of Olivia Coleman’s performance since I think she is a great actress but this movie forced her into so many outlandish situations it was hard to watch without second hand embarrassment especially during the scene where she has an argument with the man she is having an affair with in front of a group of patrons, including his wife, who are attending the premiere of Chariots of Fire. I can only infer that these ridiculous actions and the absurd overacting were done to try and capture the Oscar since the Academy often nominates a few of these types of performances and each year when I watch the nominees I am shocked when I see them as they are hard to stomach without laughing. Toby Jones, who plays the projectionist at the theatre many of them work at, is also let down in this film by the poor script. Jones is a good actor but unfortunately he is forced to spew awful cliched dialogue about being estranged from his son for so long that he cannot even remember why they came to be at odds to begin with. Maybe it is because the holiday season is still fresh in my mind and I recently re-watched Home Alone which had a much more compelling story of an older man being estranged from his son but this plot line with Jones character, which is only brought up for the first time late in the third act, felt incredibly forced and is never given a resolution and appeared to serve no purpose in the film other than to explain why such a high calibre actor was in this movie given that for much of the film he serves as nothing more than set dressing. One actor I was happy to see in this film was Tom Brooke who I think should be given more opportunities as I thought he was great in The Crown and he is good here and gives one of the more nuanced performances in this unbalanced movie. In conclusion, this was a disappointing film that felt opportunistic given that its unoriginal ode to the power of cinema in light of the challenges facing the movie business at the moment did not come off as genuine or any more profound than the Nicole Kidman AMC commercials. I gave this film a 2/10.