Review: 'Empire of Light' aims to celebrate the magic of movies, but wallows too much in their worst cliches

In contrast to recent movies that celebrate the making of movies — a broad category, encompassing the family story of “The Fabelmans” to the wretched success of the upcoming “Babylon” — director Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” celebrates the serene joy of being in the audience to watch a movie.

Too bad the movie we’re watching isn’t as magical as what Norman (Toby Jones), the philosophical projectionist, puts on the screen of the Empire, a movie house in a seaside English town. It’s 1981, and the old theater has seen better days — when the ballroom upstairs was the site of lively dances, not a nesting ground for the pigeons.

The theater’s manager, Hilary (Olivia Colman), sometimes goes upstairs to the ballroom to have a smoke and get away from the theater’s staff. She also goes up there so she doesn’t have to think about the theater’s owner, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), who makes a regular habit of shagging Hilary over his desk. Hilary is generally quiet and a little distracted — which may be the result of her current medications, which are monitored by her doctor.

Enter Stephen, played by Michael Ward, who needs a job — and gets one as a ticket-taker. He becomes quite comfortable at the Empire, a home away from home, and a refuge from the anti-Black thugs in the streets in the age of Thatcherism.

Stephen befriends Hilary, who finds in the young man a bit of the spark she once had — before she had to “go away” a few months earlier. Hilary becomes so convinced that Stephen is the spark she needs in life that she decides to stop taking her pills, and when’s the last time you saw a movie where someone goes off their meds and nothing bad happens to them?

Mendes (“Skyfall,” “1917”), who wrote and directed, stages some moments of sublime beauty, where Hilary and Stephen’s relationship creates the kind of magic only seen in movies. Unfortunately, those scenes are intercut with some of the the most hackneyed excesses of the movies — and Mendes doesn’t seem able to reconcile the two.

The performances are wonderful, even if they’re yoked to these cliche-ridden characters. Ward is a promising young actor, who carries more weight than one expects, and carries it well. Jones delivers Norman’s monologues about film as an illusion — 24 still images flashing by one’s eyes every second, tricking the eye into thinking there is movement — with gravity, but still a bemused twinkle in his eye. And Colman manages to make even Hilary’s most manic moments feel grounded in the character’s pain and loss.

“Empire of Light” is the sort of movie where it’s expected that critics will swoon at the mere mention of “the magic of the cinema.” Makers of such movies forget that we critics have seen such stories many times — and it takes more than a shared film love to bowl us over. 

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‘Empire of Light’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, language and brief violence. Running time: 119 minutes.