“But at my back I always hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Andrew Marvel
Living is the most delicate film of the last year, and Bill Nighy’s understated performance as a terminally-ill bureaucratic Brit, Mr. Williams, is achingly memorable. (Subtle sentiment enough to swamp a whale or ban a banshee, I say! ) This adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s legendary 1952 Ikiru does the master justice, both worlds, Japan and Britain, characteristically reserved and private.
Having just learned of his impending death from cancer, uptight London civil servant Williams at first goes the way any of us might such as seaside penny arcades and striptease shows. However, he slowly steps into the role of caring human being, starting by taking a young bucktoothed office worker, Margaret Harris (Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood), to lunch without any other agenda than to begin opening up. He is leaving his “nowhere man” behind.
The scenes between them, with her never quite sure if this can be the same tightly-bound boss she’s always known and an openness that begs him to watch how life is to be lived. Nighy plays it right by lacking flamboyance but rather as if he were just quietly emerging into life as it should be lived—caring without an agenda. In some ways, he’s Tom Hanks’ Otto but just across the pond with a little emotional help from Dvorak and Vaughn Williams.
While his close-knit bureaucratic colleagues continue to be like their bowler hats--rigid and lacking color, Williams already has a hip new hat along with his life of meaning. The civil servants remain rigid, except for the new worker, Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), young and quiet but smiling and charming, meant by prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro (and before him, of course, Kurosawa) to be the new, softer, more romantic Williams.
One of the virtues of this sober take on the end of days is to go gently, not drunkenly, and leave no mountains of office folders, but a legacy that cares for children at play, not adults playing at life. When he files into the “in basket” the plaintiff request from three ladies to rehab a playground, he is promoting the reserve he needs to let go.
Although Brits are often depicted as conservatively stifling romance and joy in life, Living shows how one bureaucrat broke the mold, even if he had a short time to enjoy a life of love and service. Better living than not at all when you are alive, Living warns us.
“I took to looking around myself a little.” Mr. Williams
Living
Director: Oliver Hermanus (Moffie)
Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), from Akira Kurosawa (Ikuru)
Cast: Bill Nighy (Love Actually)
Run Time: 1h 42m
Rating: PG-13
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
