Two and a half stars
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I watched a movie the other night called “Empire of Light,” about a fraught romance between two English movie-theater staffers in the early 1980s. Caught in the self-made mire of scrolling for a movie without having decided in advance, I saw this one’s director and who shot it (Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins, who collaborated on “1917”) and who led the cast (Olivia Colman, for me always “of ’Fleabag’”) and that it was free to stream, and pressed play.
Then, as the first minutes ticked by, I did start to wonder what the critics thought. Which part of this luscious and soulful display had they celebrated most? Turns out “Empire of Light,” which came out during Oscar-bait season last year, is not a four-star movie or even really a three-star movie, in the aggregate. Among the very mixed reviews, the one that landed with me took inventory of the film’s strong points but gave it only two and a half stars: “‘Empire of Light’ never entirely coheres.”
I agree, yet I also thought it was just a little spellbinding, like a two-milligram edible; and for those of us with a more rotational attention, sometimes it’s a relief just to sit and watch and not want to do anything else. This can be an effect of the finest art available to humanity, and it can happen from something lesser, and the second category is interesting. What’s the value of the two-and-a-half-star thing?
This question comes into play for a thing’s creator, too. For instance, there are times when this isn’t a four-star newsletter (not many, but some). It’s more important to keep the wheel turning—to meet the deadline, to not get bogged down—than it is to achieve total satisfaction. I apologize to you for those weaker moments, and yet I regard them as an integral part of the practice that sometimes yields up better results. That’s nothing like how I approach my novel, a project of almost existential importance to me—which, no coincidence, doesn’t get published twice a week. And these two pursuits are bound, in that one supplies momentum and evolution and the other a horizon.
More broadly, and as an audience member, I don’t think the value of the two-and-a-half-star thing lies just in the fact that not everything can be great, or that it’s only by comparison to mediocre things that we appreciate the superior ones. It has intrinsic value, because it’s simpler to parse than something that’s monolithically good. In a movie like “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman isn’t half-hidden behind another comic genius, as in “Fleabag”; she’s out front and incredibly exposed, lipstick on her teeth. The Deakins photography and the Trent Reznor score and the acting in “Empire” are virtuosic, the velvet on the lobby benches crackles with a dimensional warmth, and you have plenty of room to notice all of it because so much separates these things from one another, from the thing they are a part of.
That lack of coherence is the value of two and a half stars, for anyone who wants to make sense of good creative work—because it illustrates why solid craft isn’t enough. Coherence in this sense is what, in philosophy class, we used to call an emergent property: You couldn’t look at the parts and predict it. It becomes evident in the operation of the whole.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.