Living

Bill Nighy gives a wonderfully understated performance in this Western remake of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru. Set in 1950s London, Living stars Nighy as Rodney Williams, a bureaucrat, widower, and father to a week-willed son. Williams has spent the last thirty years of his monotonous life pushing paper around his County Council desk. He's essentially been dead for decades, but when his doctor gives him six months to live, he tries to return to the world of the living again but finds that harder than it might seem for someone so set in his ways.

Nighy is known for playing older, proper English gents like this, except nearly all his prior characters have a playful or mischievous aspect to them. It's impressive to see him play into and against type in this role of a man trying to connect to an aspect of himself that was either never there or lost long ago. His quiet performance is modulated and layered his voice high and reedy; his physicality frail and papery. He speaks in ways that trail off as if his thoughts weren't important enough to finish, yet he usually finds a way to complete them with a look or gesture. Like Takashi Shimura’s character in Ikiru, Nighy's Mr. Williams sings a song at two points in the movie. The Scottish folk song "The Rowan Tree," takes the place of the Japanese romantic ballad "The Gondola Song," and while the lyrics are slightly less direct, the song has the ability to evoke different feelings in two separate sections of the film. And Nighy delivers the song in two distinct ways that are equally powerful.

Living is directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, whose prior work I’m not familiar with. The script is adapted by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go), whose screenwriting credits include James Ivory’s 2005 film The White Countess. Ishiguro follows the Ikiru screenplay by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni's almost scene for scene and beat for beat apart from some notable changes. For one thing, Ishiguro jettisons Kurosawa's omniscient narrator and makes the elderly bureaucrat’s co-workers into more of a Greek chorus. He then shrinks Ikiru's third act to something far more palatable for a contemporary Western audience. Living dispenses with the original film's lengthy set piece in which all the coworkers and others get drunk, argue, speechify, and make empty promises at the wake. It focuses its finale more on how Mr. Williams spent his final months of life. Much of it is done in a kind of breezy montage, which makes the film play far more upbeat than Ikiru. Interestingly, these two significant changes make Living feel like a much smaller movie than Kurosawa's magisterial picture. However, this is not really a problem since part of the point of this story is that most men lead small lives but can still have a large effect on those around them.

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