Empire of Light film review — Olivia Colman ushers in melancholy ode to cinema

One nice thing about the dark of a cinema is the wonderment of the big-screen experience. Another is not having to see the state of the place. The first of these has already inspired many, many movies. The second, less familiar, seems like it might be the subject of Empire of Light, the mixed bag of a new film from Sam Mendes.

Set in a gently faded picture palace in an unnamed seaside town on the English south coast circa 1981, the story offers a detailed glimpse behind the scenes. Stock management of Maltesers plays a key supporting role. So too the back office, where a puffed-up manager has a tryst with an usher. The pair are played by Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, muted passions expertly conveyed. “You’re so helpful,” Firth pants. Was any adjective ever more erotic?

A still more mordantly funny scene will involve the theme to Chariots of Fire. But I may mislead you. Despite such droll moments, Empire of Light is not a comedy. It is also, contrary to first impressions, very much another film about the glory of cinema itself. That message comes within a conundrum of a movie: well-acted and well-meant, strikingly melancholy, but prettified and artificial too.

At the heart of it is Colman’s fortysomething Hilary Small. Named with a wink to the audience, she has been stifled and compacted by sexism and mental health crises. For Hilary, the Empire is just a job, the films irrelevant. Instead, her escape is Stephen (Micheal Ward), a saintly new tearer of tickets she befriends while he tends to a wounded pigeon.

This part, regrettably, is not a joke. Pity the bird, grounded by narrative foreshadowing. Spare a thought too for Ward. A standout in Steve McQueen’s film series Small Axe, here he is asked to play a character so tethered to the script you expect to see a cursor flashing by his head.

In a film that did other things less well, the problem might not be so glaring. Having been a child on the real south coast of 1981, I can vouch for how precisely Mendes captures the mood. A litany of local celebs is perfect. (Paul McCartney! Steve Ovett!) More important, he nails the lost-soul ambience of British seaside towns, drawing in a woman like Hilary. But Stephen, a young black guy in a place of deep non-diversity, feels hopelessly one-dimensional: a device in someone else’s story.

This lopsided mix is pasted together with the stuff of Mendes’s “love letter to cinema”. Revered director of photography Roger Deakins gives everything a suitably lovely burnish. Residents of Margate — the filming location — may be surprised at how good their town can look when shot by an Oscar-winning cinematographer.

Among the characters, the hard sell falls to Toby Jones’s perfectionist projectionist. He gets one excellent line, and a lot of blarney about the magic of the medium. On balance, it suggests Mendes may not, after all, have spent much time in an actual 1980s seaside Odeon, watching a battered print manhandled by a bloke dozing off in the projection booth. Ah, movies. Forever such a trick of the light.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from January 9 and in US cinemas now