Empire of Light

For a “small film,” writer/director Sam Mendes sure stuffs this one full.

At first take it’s the story of Hilary, a schizophrenic spinster who manages a small neighbourhood cinema in 1980s England, and her relationship with the staff, especially Manager Ellis, who sexually abuses her, and Stephen, the young West Indian man with whom she develops a genuine supportive relationship. 

The theatre is in Margate, to be specific. That happens to be where T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, which Hillary cites early as a crossword answer: “April is the cruelest month” — because nature’s revival only heightens the human’s sense of being dead. Later she recites a  Philip Larkin poem that celebrates nature’s revival as an emblem of man’s.

True to the title, Hilary’s revival may begin with her affair with Stephen. That once dashed, she finds salvation and meaning in films. She finally starts watching the films she has been distantly conveying. That is one reading of the title: We find help managing our real world  in the fantasies of cinema. 

Perhaps the key statement is projectionist Norman’s explanation of the phi phenomenon to Stephen: ”There's a little flaw in our optic nerve so if I run the film at 24 frames per second, you don't see the darkness... viewing static images rapidly in succession creates an illusion of motion, illusion of life.” We experience the empire of brightness by ignoring, looking past it, averting the intervening disruptive darkness. Paradoxically, two black carbon cones connect to create the beam of life that will project the reel images onto the real screen. 

The manager’s corruption is amplified in the outside world by the skinheads who torment Stephen in the street and by the white supremacist mob that storms the street, breaking into the theatre and brutally beating Stephen. In that scene a poster promises Day of the Locusts, itself a film that climaxes in a mob riot. 

The film references are thus pointed throughout. A clip from Stir Crazy offers an alternative world, where Gene Wilder and Richard Prior project a biracial camaraderie. The sign-manager doesn’t quite complete the second word of the coming Raging Bull leaving the emphasis on the rage. At the end Norman revives Hilary’s spirit with a private screening of Being There, the satire of a hapless cypher finding himself being treated as a fount of wisdom. 

As the film is set in the early 1980s Britain still has superb social services. They bring Hilary out of her abyss, but yet not fully back to life. For that she needs to be welcomed back to her cinema community — and engage the enchantment of the films. They bring her out of herself. 

With Hilary’s encouragement Stephen overcomes his despair and renews his application for university. For a while he may incline towards a career as a projectionist. But in following his desire to be an architect he eschews the cinema’s fantasy world for the building of real edifices. 

For the film world can also bring disappointments. At the announcement of a regional premiere of Chariots of Fire the crew are promised celebrity appearances by Dora Bryant, SIR Laurence Olivier, DAME Flora Robson, Dusty Springfield, and perhaps even … Paul McCartney. As we see at Ellis’s formal opening of the premiere, however, only the local mayor and a couple of councillors have arrived. Films adhere more carefully to their script than reality does. And so Manager Ellis — after Hilary has exposed to his wife his adultery — is punished … with a promotion to a cinema in Brighton. 

The theatre itself is a classical architectural beauty. As an emblem of the fractured society and  lead characters, only its two lower floors remain in use. The spectacular, opulent upper two lie in neglect and ruin, beset by pigeons. Stephen restores a broken-winged pigeon up there and amorously begins Hilary’s repair with a friendship deeper even than the care their other workmates have for her.

By the way, that theatre — actually the abandoned Dreamland — is here named The Empire. Said Chariots of Fire was itself an emblematic attempt to revive contemporary England’s lost significance and glory. This gives the central story of Stephen’s courageous campaign for acceptance and spinster Hilary’s recovery of self-respect and hope a national dimension.