With Living, director Oliver Hermanus takes on an intimidating challenge: to remake one of the best films from one of the great filmmakers. The film is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, that transcendental masterpiece (partly inspired by Leo Tolstoy) about a dying man and the life he suddenly embraces after years spent ignoring it. This isn’t a challenge a director should take lightly, so the most affecting and surprising thing is that Hermanus doesn’t try too hard to emulate a cinema master. The first major difference is in setting the action within a specific historical timeframe – namely, 1953, just one year after the international release of the original movie – and in a different place – specifically, London, not too long after the end of WWII.
The key here (and, really, in any such situation) is not to spend too much energy on comparisons between two very different movies. Kurosawa’s film stands apart from and above a lot of other directors’ entire filmographies, and any results from a remake would be diminishing in direct comparison to that achievement. Hermanus’ reimagining of the material, though, works surprisingly well within the same thematic sandbox. As with Takashi Shimura’s Kanji Watanabe in that film, here is Bill Nighy’s Mr. Williams, a government bureaucrat whose life of boredom and drudgery infects everyone within his circle, until a fatal prognosis reshapes his outlook on life and his perspective of the world around him.
The general plot trajectory remains the same, as Williams, a dull and boring man, finds out he is dying from stomach cancer and decides, with months left on this mortal coil, to grab life by the reins. He parties hard with an acquaintance named Sutherland (Tom Burke, in a potent, perfectly attuned extended cameo performance), struggles to tell his inattentive and dismissive son (Barney Fishwick) about his diagnosis, and takes a sudden interest in a young woman from his office, Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), in a relationship that, as in the original, strikes us as the most fascinating extension of the old man’s personality.
Indeed, the scenes between Nighy and Wood are the film’s best – not only because of the former’s observant and richly detailed portrait of a dying man, but because Wood is also particularly great here, playing a bright, inquisitive spirit who enjoys but is also a little puzzled by this newfound friendship with a man she never quite liked before. These are wonderful performances, constructing a beating heart that remains through the bold-as-ever final act, which confronts, not only mortality, but legacy. The other secret weapon in the film’s arsenal is hiring the great novelist Kazuo Ishiguro to pen a screenplay that simply gushes with understanding of and affection for these characters.
The result is a movie that has the feeling of a great short novel – exactly the kind for which Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize winner, in fact – in both its narrative breadth and subjective brevity. The production is also quietly stunning, from the subtly expressive costume design to the note-perfect period art direction. Most impressively, cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay’s stark compositions reflect both the stodgy life of the film’s protagonist, Williams, and the joy later found in his interactions. Our perspective is opened up as a result of the visual language here, and it’s gorgeous to behold.
Really, the film in its entirety sneaks up on the viewer in ways that are impossible to predict. Living proves itself to be more than simply another version of a great film. The movie is quite notable in its own right and on its own merits.
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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