Movies: Empire of Light

A magical movie about finding lightness in a damaged life

This is a magical film about repairing a damaged life. Every frame glows, washing over the audience and theater, which is where I watched Empire of Light. I’m glad I did, too. Ever since ArcLight Cinemas was killed—another victim of LA’s asinine lockdown during 2020’s cataclysmic coronavirus pandemic—I pass by the former San Fernando Valley theater at the interchange of America’s busiest freeways, always wanting to experience new movies there. Empire of Light, a movie about the magic of the movies, played there just in time. The British drama, written and directed by Sam Mendes, who directed 1999’s anti-American American Beauty, is the first film I’ve seen at the former ArcLight Sherman Oaks, now a Regal Cinemas theater property.

It’s by Mendes, so there’s a disturbing twist. The shift slips into place better than you might suppose. For its naturalism and jarring plot twist, Empire of Light blends muted color, lightness and the tenderness of youth into a kind of compact. With Olivia Colman in a sensational career best performance, having made a career of being plain, Toby Jones as a knowing mentor and machinist and an actor with innocent eyes named Micheal Ward—with Colin Firth as a cad—Empire of Light casts wisdom and wonder into shadows and direct, bright light. This is probably Mendes’s best picture.

With poetry by Wystan Hugh Auden and Alfred Lord Tennyson, piano music by Nine Inch Nails’s Trent Reznor, gorgeous photography set to a playful pace with a startling climax, Empire of Light’s original in every way. It is also flawed. It’s not clear when and exactly where this takes place, for one thing. Liberties with reality strain credibility—it distorts the way things are—and the ideas are debatable; some might say deplorable. They’re also thought-provoking in certain respects.

Almost any major movie released circa 1980 is referenced at some point—Being There, Raging Bull, Private Benjamin, Chariots of Fire; films, like Empire of Light, depicting characters in some sort of pairing who are entering the arena, grappling with a state of mind—and the role of cinema unfolds without being heavy-handed for a change. Unlike previous movies about the movies, film is showcased through an interracial affair with a generational gap, which adds poignancy. Empire of Light fades from a scene of redemption. This features a character who’s in solitude, at last and at best—or better off—as a cheerful toast to the start of what could become a happy new year.