“Empire of Light”: Illuminating the Darkness

Writer-director Sam Mendes has a gift for portraying wounded souls. And actress Olivia Colman has a gift for embodying them. In last year’s Empire of Light, a fading movie theatre in a seaside English town becomes the venue in which a lonely, psychologically damaged woman (Colman) suffers great indignity, lashes out with a vengeance, but finally finds her way.

 Movies about movie theatres are almost as familiar today as movies about movies. Back in 1924, the whimsical Sherlock Jr. focused on a projectionist (Buster Keaton) who, pining for a pretty girl, imaginatively willed himself into the movie he was screening, transforming his nebbishy self into a bold detective. In The Last Picture Show (1971),. Peter Bogdanovich uses the shuttering of a local Texas movie house to illustrate the slow death of a small town. But the real classic in this genre is 1988’s Cinema Paradiso, a heartfelt Italian coming-of-age tale about the formative relationship between a young boy and the middle-aged projectionist at a local theatre.

 Empire of Light also takes us into the projection booth, as a new employee learns the ropes from a dedicated  veteran (Toby Jones). But Colman’s character, Hilary, who functions with great efficiency as the theatre’s manager, rarely watches a film herself.. She may connect emotionally with the theatre building’s long-ago grandeur, and chooses the night of a major local premiere (Chariots of Fire) to strike out against  someone who deserves it, but it’s rare for her to sit and be transported by the magic of cinema. It’s only late in the film, when she’s seen the worst of what life can do, that she asks the projectionist to screen a film just for her. Her choice was to me somewhat unexpected: Peter Seller’s melancholy 1979 tour de force, Being There. er  Her choice

 Empire of Light is set in the 1980s, and one part of the social world it depicts is the era’s common right-wing hostility to Black immigrants. Though the cinema employees are mostly a welcoming lot, a new young Black hire, Stephen (Micheal Ward), has to face up to vicious skinhead types who would be all too happy to do him physical harm. He’s a young man, the son of a local nurse, who’s betwixt and between: he’d like to go to college to pursue a degree in architecture, but he’s pretty much given up on that expensive dream. Somehow he connects with Colman’s Hilary over a wounded pigeon and the old theatre building’s picturesquely empty upstairs salons. The Hilary/Stephen relationship—part familial, part sexual—gives pleasure to them both. But of course it is doomed not to last. They are simply too different from one another, and too caught up in their own problems to take on someone else’s.

 So there’s no happy ending? Well, let’s say that progress is made on all fronts. Friendships survive, and the old theatre (played in the film by an actual historic cinema that’s no longer in service) continues to use beams of light to project  moving images onto a screen. It’s magic, in more ways than one. 

 Sam Mendes segued from acclaimed work on the British stage to an Oscar-winning American movie, the painfully sardonic American Beauty (1999). His subsequent films have included a crime thriller, Road to Perdition, a James Bond classic, Skyfall, and a much- honored World War I epic, 1917. Empire of Light returns him to the role of writer-director of an intimate but powerful small-cast film. Though it doesn’t pack nearly the punch of American Beauty, it’s worth seeing (and admiring) in its own right.

 

John Sayles: A Man for All Genres

My good friend Frances Doel (hi, Frances!) was the one who brought John Sayles into movieland. Having read Sayles’ lively stories in classy magazines like The Atlantic, she suggested him to Roger Corman as a potential screenwriter. Sayles took to low-budget filmmaking immediately, crafting the hilariously lethal Piranha and the space opera Battle Beyond the Stars. (The latter, a sort of cheapie Star Wars clone,  was also the launching pad for another future director, James Cameron.) Everyone knew from the start that the multi-talented Sayles aimed to direct: he spent much time on the set, soaking up everything he could about how movies were made.

 When I spoke to Sayles for my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, he told me how much his New World Pictures years had taught him about Filmmaking 101: “When do you need suspense rather than action? When do you need comedy to give people a break from the suspense? That’s what I found that Roger and Frances were very good at.” He also discovered how to write for a Corman budget, and how to approach a script in terms of its marketable elements (“How could you advertise this film?”) He put all this to use in 1980 when he had accumulated $40,000 to invest in his directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7. This was, in Sayles’ words, a film in which “I started with very little money, and said, ‘What can I do well?’ ”

 Secaucus 7, a college reunion story often seen as a precursor to The Big Chill, revealed Sayles’ longstanding interest in social groupings. When I think of Sayles’ career, I tend to remember Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996), tough dramas focusing on complex interactions in periods of political and economic stress. But Sayles can also be darkly satirical, as in The Brother from Another Planet (1984), wherein a dark-skinned alien (Joe Morton) lands on earth and tries to fit in.  

 I recently visited two Sayles films from the 1990s which may seem out of character, but reveal his skill with actors and exotic landscapes. Passion Fish (1992) is very much a female film, influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. It features longtime Sayles favorite Mary McDonnell as a soap opera star who, after a serious accident, has been left a paraplegic. Returning to her family home in rural Louisiana, she wallows in self-pity until a no-nonsense Black caregiver with problems of her own (Alfre Woodward) enters her life. The story is by no means saccharine: McDonnell’s character can be bitchy, and Hollywood comes in for some well-deserved satirical licks. But it’s a down-to-earth tale of resilience and acceptance, beautifully acted and filmed.

 The big surprise is 1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish, adapted by Sayles from an Irish novel full of mythological creatures. Sayles’ Ireland is not the cheerful domain of Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Nor is it nearly as black as The Banshees of Inisherin. Roan Inish is a family film, with a young girl as its central character, in which terrible things have happened in the past but the ultimate ending is upbeat. Set largely on a mysterious island, it’s surely the most gorgeous film that Sayles has ever made, full of water, sand, gulls, and the seals who share a magical inheritance. I love the fact that it was shot by a late-in-life Haskell Wexler,  another deeply political filmmaker who set all that aside to revel in the beauty and the folklore  of the Irish coast.

 

"80 For Brady”: Before Time Passes Us By

On a flight back to L.A. following a trip that was alternatively inspiring and stressful, I was looking for light-weight entertainment on my seatback system. That’s why I turned to 80 for Brady, a comedy I knew would distract me from the cares of my everyday world. How could it fail to amuse, given that its cast was headed by some of Hollywood’s most reliable veterans? The combined star power of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field (not to mention their combined Oscars, Emmys, and other accolades) was sure to divert me from my own anxieties. And so it (mostly) did.

 Very loosely based on an actual group of octogenarians with super-sized crushes on New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the plot features four lifelong friends of a certain age who stake everything on a trip to Houston to cheer on their hero in Super Bowl LI.  Of course the differences between the four women are sharply delineated. Trish (Jane Fonda) is a still-glamorous former beauty queen with a record number of failed romances. Maura (Rita Moreno) is a recent widow whose life in a dead-end retirement home is stifling her competitive spirit. The youngster of the group is Betty (Sally Field), who keeps reminding everyone that she’s personally not yet 80. She’s (theoretically) the responsible one: a mathematics whiz whose fellow-professor spouse (Bob Balaban) is a bit too clingy for the good of their marriage. Finally there’s Lou (Lily Tomlin), whose need for a big adventure at this point in her life clouds her judgment, and is the axis around which this story turns.

 I always dread movies that demean “cute” senior citizens by showing them trying to emulate younger, hipper folks. And of course there’s some of that here, including the inevitable (sigh!) sequence in which they accidentally trip out on cannabis gummies. And I winced when so much of the plot hinges on the search for an essential lost item (yes, I too had just lost something important, which is why this plane trip was so fraught for me.) Still, there’s fun to be had when the four overcome the world’s easy stereotypes about the elderly by showing they can dance like champions, play a killer hand of cards, and emerge victorious from a spicy food competition hosted by TV’s Guy Fieri.

 What startled me, in retrospect, was the weird parallel between 80 For Brady and the kind of movie my peers and I enjoyed when we were teenagers. One big hit in my junior highs school crowd was 1960’s Where The Boys Are. It’s the story of four college co-eds (back then the term was still used) who head south to Florida for spring break. Of course their #1 goal is romance, and they mostly find it, with very mixed results. The natural leader of the group (Dolores Hart) discovers the kind of love that may last a lifetime. The joker (Paula Prentiss in her film debut) finds an equally tall, equally goofy opposite number (Jim Hutton), and they briefly enjoy a romantic romp. Poor Angie (recording star Connie Francis) never succeeds at love, but she gets to sing the plaintive title song, which was soon blasting from radios throughout the country. And the most serious of the plotlines features lovely Yvette Mimieux whose trusting nature leads her into a genuine crisis.

 The ladies of 80 for Brady are mostly not looking for love, or even sex. Their problems are darker: widowhood, the diminishing of personal autonomy, life-threatening illness. Which doesn’t stop them from having fun wherever they can find it.