Review
Living review – Bill Nighy tackles life and death
in exquisitely sad drama
A gentle and poignant Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake
of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru about a man dealing with a terminal
diagnosis
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 2 Nov
2022 14.50 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jan/21/living-bill-night-kurosawa-ikiru-remake
The
terrible conversation in the hospital consulting room – that final rite of
passage – is the starting point for this deeply felt, beautifully acted movie
from screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus: a remake of
Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, or To Live.
A
buttoned-up civil servant works joylessly in the town planning department; he
is a lonely widower estranged from his grasping son and daughter-in-law. In the
original, he was Mr Watanabe, played by Takashi Shimura. Now he is Mr Williams,
played by Bill Nighy.
Approaching
retirement, his supposed reward for a life of pointless tedium, Mr Williams
receives a stomach-cancer diagnosis with one year to live. And now he realises
that he has been dead until this moment. After a mad and undignified attempt at
boozy debauchery in the company of a louche writer (Tom Burke), Mr Williams
realises there is one thing he might still achieve: forcing the city
authorities to build the modest little children’s playground for which local
mothers have been desperately petitioning and which he and his colleagues have
been smugly preventing with their bureaucratic inertia.
Through
sheer force of will, and astonishing his co-workers with his deeply unbecoming
new urgency and baffling desire to help people, Mr Williams is determined to
get the playground built before death closes in.
When
Kurosawa’s film came out, it was set in the present day: a fiercely contemporary
work about modern Japan and very different from his period dramas. Hermanus and
Ishiguro have taken the decision to set it in the 1950s as well, and so
ingeniously recasting it as a historical piece: Nighy’s melancholy functionary
works in the postwar London county council. He is ramrod straight in his
pinstripe suit and bowler, an English gentleman through and through, whereas
Shimura’s Mr Watanabe in Tokyo was doubled over with the pain of stomach
cancer, in a parodic and deepening bow of Japanese respect.
Nighy is
heartbreakingly shy and sensitive, his refined, almost birdlike profile
presented to the camera in occasional stark and enigmatic closeups. This is a
man who has had to suppress a natural wit and affectionate raillery all his
life in the service of a dull job which meant nothing. His poignantly damaged
rebirth has been caused by his diagnosis, and also his platonic yet nonetheless
scandalous infatuation with a female junior: the innocently flirtatious
Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), who entrances him, perhaps chiefly because she is
quitting this dull office and trying something new. Meanwhile, a young man just
starting there, played by Alex Sharp, intuits Mr Williams’s pain and sees how
he himself might wind up the same way, out of unexamined loyalty to this older
generation’s self-sacrificial woes.
Ishiguro
has jettisoned the enigmatic, almost Capraesque voiceover from Kurosawa’s film,
lost also the local gangsters that Watanabe faces down with his new, reckless
courage of cancer. Maybe they seemed too Greeneian in 50s Britain. He has found
a sweeter, more positive interpretation of the film’s final scenes, and a
redemptive love affair among the younger generation, but kept the central
structural coup in Ikiru, positioning the moment of the civil servant’s death
so that we see all the besuited functionaries bickering and posturing after Mr
Williams is gone, like Ivan Ilych’s colleagues in Tolstoy’s story or the people
divvying up Scrooge’s bed linen in A Christmas Carol.
I was sorry
that Ishiguro removed my favourite moment from Ikiru, when the civil servant,
in a flash of existential panic, realises that he cannot think of any specific
thing that has happened in his 30 years’ employment. It has all passed like a
swift, featureless dream. But Ishiguro makes an inspired adjustment to the
children’s playground itself – with Mr Williams noting that though some
children are badly behaved and tantrum-prone when they are called away by their
mothers, that is better than being one of those children who just hopelessly
wait for playtime to end. In Living, the playground is not simply the
widow’s-mite gift the civil servant has poignantly handed over to the community
before his death. With its humble little swing set and roundabout, it is a
symbol of everyone’s brief attempt at living.
This is a
film which resonated in my mind, with its perennial question: isn’t it possible
to achieve Mr Williams’s passionate dedication without the terminal illness?
After all, haven’t we all got that same mortal prognosis? Or is the terrible
paradox that you need to be told what you know already but were trying not to
think about? A gentle, exquisitely sad film.
Living
screened at the Sundance film festival and is released in the UK on 4 November.
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Living review: Bill Nighy delivers an almost
startling transformation in this beautiful period drama
In a performance tipped for Oscar attention, the
British actor sheds his trademark, twinkling charisma like snakeskin
Clarisse
Loughrey
Wednesday
02 November 2022 16:41
Dir: Oliver
Hermanus. Starring: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke. 12A, 102
minutes.
Ikiru, in
its plaintive modernity, may not be the most widely recognisable of Akira
Kurosawa’s films. It can’t be slotted so neatly beside the savage violence and
heroic ideals of his historical films, Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood
(1957) or Ran (1985). But the 1952 drama’s message, that a worthy legacy can be
built from the tiniest and most fleeting of things, has endured. It’s
encapsulated in the single image of a dying bureaucrat (played by Takashi
Shimura) singing to himself as he sits on the swingset of the playground he
helped build. Decades later, it’s an image that’s been reframed but barely
rethought by South African director Oliver Hermanus, Nobel Prize-winning
screenwriter Ishiguro Kazuo and actor Bill Nighy with Living. But, like the
bureaucrat’s cherished swingset, that vague feeling of inconsequence shouldn’t
make much difference. What does it matter if a film isn’t necessarily built to
last? Living still has its compelling beauty.
Hermanus’s
film is set in the Fifties, making it a period piece rather than a contemporary
portrait as Ikiru was. It also takes place halfway around the world in London.
Nighy’s bureaucrat, Mr Williams, is dying of stomach cancer. He’s spent the
majority of his life in the same job at London County Hall, its monotony as
constant as the piles of paperwork that pen him into his desk. It’s a necessary
bit of mess, his young employee Ms Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) warns him, since
without them “people suspect you of not having anything very important to do”.
Following
his diagnosis, Mr Williams seeks existential comfort not from his own son, who
he insists “has his own life”, but from a Brighton louche (Tom Burke) and the
cheery Ms Harris. He invites the latter out to the movies and then for a drink,
while confessing that he doesn’t feel able to go home (read: be alone) quite
yet. She worries he’s developed a strange infatuation. But in reality, Mr
Williams seems convinced that proximity to youth might be able to stave off his
own mortality. “I have no special quality,” Ms Harris insists. He will have to
seek meaning elsewhere.
Much of the
artfulness of Living does, in part, feel borrowed from Ikiru. Here the chaotic
symphony of city life is rendered not through car horns but the steady beat of
commuter footsteps, surging back and forth along the same daily paths. Those
towering paper stacks slice through frames, isolating its characters, who are
sometimes made to look as small and crushable as ants. Hermanus ruminates on
these images a little more than Kurosawa might. He already knows their power,
and allows cinematographer Jamie D Ramsay to bathe them in a soft, milky light.
Crucially,
we are not told of Mr Williams’s condition up front, as Ikiru does through its
introductory narration. Instead, we’re introduced to him through the eyes of Mr
Wakeling (Alex Sharp), a new hire at the office – specifically, in a shot of Mr
Williams as seen through a train window, appropriately framed by a circle of
morning frost. Nighy, too, has shed his trademark, twinkling charisma like
snakeskin. What lies beneath is something almost spectral in its stillness, a
man already half-dead and certainly deserving of Ms Harris’s secret nickname of
“Mr Zombie”. It’s an almost startling transformation for the actor, a standout
performance of an already much-lauded career. His contributions help guide
Living on its muted but no less emotive journey to that singular image of a
man, renewed, alone on a swingset. Hermanus is more than happy for his film to
live in the shadows of Kurosawa’s. There’s still much to savour.
‘Living’ is
in cinemas from 4 November
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