★★☆☆☆
Alas, it has finally happened: Olivia Colman has given a weak performance. The Oscar-winning star of The Favourite and de facto national treasure is the protagonist of Sam Mendes’s quasi-autobiographical film about life in seaside Britain in the 1980s. She plays a schizophrenic duty manager called Hilary who works in a grand picture palace on the south coast and falls for a young black usher called Stephen (Micheal Ward from Lovers Rock), but the course of true love is challenged by racism, violence and medical relapses. It’s not that Colman’s performance as Hilary is especially terrible — there are a handful of convincing quieter moments, where her harried expression conveys an intolerable world of inner turmoil. It’s just that she’s not strong enough to overcome the clunky incoherence of material that is, for the first time in his film-making career, written entirely by Mendes.
Little convinces as anything other than a first-draft screenwriting exercise. Hilary is introduced as a full-time cinema manager who has never watched a movie. She doesn’t know how they work, or what it’s like to observe moving pictures as drama. It’s a nice conceit and gives her an obvious arc to travel, but for someone who lives in 1981 and is depicted at home alone, watching TV, it simply doesn’t make sense — does she turn off the box whenever a movie appears?
Hilary’s reality is seemingly constructed of symbolic gestures that mostly defy any attempt at verisimilitude and range from silly to cringeworthy. She takes ballroom dancing classes, which are used by Mendes to illustrate her loneliness but have no function in the drama. With Stephen she finds a pigeon with a broken wing in the unused top floor of the cinema. They wrap the pigeon in a sock and heal it. This is because Hilary is a metaphorical pigeon with a broken wing and she needs to be healed too. Which is fine but also ungainly, and the scenes with the bird seem to be signposted with, “Time to check in on the avian metaphor on the top floor!”
These might have been minor complaints if Hilary’s relationship with Stephen was the fiery, thrusting soul of the film it so desperately needs to be. Instead, it’s again all symbol without a hint of credible feelings, connection and chemistry. Hilary’s schizophrenia is expressed in irascible outbursts and a twitchy, mercurial personality that passes seemingly unnoticed by Stephen. At a New Year’s Eve party Hilary glares at Stephen with an unhinged bug-eyed enthusiasm that suggests an especially ravenous fox staring at a wounded bunny (a bold performance choice from Colman) but is ignored by him.
As a character, Stephen is paper-thin, a vessel for goodness and purity who is motivated only by a desire to study in university, to learn about cinema projection from Toby Jones and to be nice to everyone. This couple’s relationship is crying out for the kind of analysis that Mendes seems unable, or unwilling, to deliver. Instead of prising apart the meaning of their age gap, cultural differences and mental health challenges, he prefers the tedium of banal flirtations, romantic day trips to the beach and delicately lit sequences (courtesy of the ace cinematographer Roger Deakins) of life-altering sex. It’s also unfortunate that Hilary’s few short scenes of furtive “hand relief” with Colin Firth’s cinema owner contain more hints of gritty realism than the wobbly central romance.
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When Mendes attempts to run his fantasy milieu up against the reality of Eighties Britain in the final act it’s all too little, too late and too corny. Stephen, it transpires, has been learning about racism and tells Hilary about this new problem called “the skinheads and Thatcher . . . It’s in the newspapers. It’s not going away.” Almost immediately, a random gang of neo-Nazis marches along the seafront, smashes into the cinema lobby and drops a soupçon of jeopardy into the otherwise tedious proceedings. But even then it’s all decidedly am-dram and punishingly bland.
Mendes has said that the movie is deeply personal and filled with intimate emotional details from his teenage years (as a schoolboy in Primrose Hill in London, with David Miliband as a classmate?). If so, the best that can be said about the result of this introspection is that it’s inoffensive, slightly dull and boasts all the depth and moral engagement of an especially incurious adolescent.
15, 115min
In cinemas from January 9
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