The problem is that, at first, all the characters are written Small, not just Hilary: figurines of "ordinary people" that would seem condescending if the performers didn't give them life through body language and intonation, and if Mendes and Deakins didn't frame and light them with such care. Mendes and his cinematographer Roger Deakins use the panoramic screen shape to emphasize how ordinary lives unfold within a landscape of history that the tiny figures in its foreground can't fully comprehend. Various characters keep urging the heroine, the lonely, workaholic duty manager Hilary Small ( Olivia Colman), to go sit in an auditorium once in a while, and let cinema transport her away from her miseries (one guess as to whether she takes their suggestion). There's a projectionist played by Toby Jones who demonstrates how a projector works and talks about the persistence of vision and how light can shut out darkness. And in the first third of "Empire of Light," there are many warning signs that the film is going to amount to nothing more than an Oscar campaign for itself.
The result keeps seeming as if it's about to fully commit being another "Behold The Magic of the Movies" movies (we get a couple of those a year, at least film awards voters like them) as well as a quasi-memoir that puts a new frame around an established director's work (there have been several of those recently as well sometimes they're the same movie). The story is set in the fall and winter of 1980-81 in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, around a palatial two-screen Art Deco theater that shows films that were new back then (including " Raging Bull," " Stir Crazy," and "9 to 5") and that fed the imagination of young Mendes, who based parts of the script on his youth. "Empire of Light" is a grandiose title for Sam Mendes' intimate new character drama, which starts out a bit dim and unfocused and becomes sharper and more illuminating as it unreels.
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