Mark Reviews Movies: LIVING

Living, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 22, 2022

It takes a lot of courage, brashness, and/or foolishness to remake a great film made by one of the greatest filmmakers, but here's director Oliver Hermanus' Living, which tells the story of a dying government bureaucrat who tries to discover some meaning in his soon-to-end life. The film doesn't try to hide that it's based on Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru. The opening credits display the film's origins as proudly as everything and everyone else involved in the production. For whatever expectations one might have about the announcement that they're about to watch a remake of a great and timeless film, this version, surprisingly and thankfully, withstands and defeats most of that skepticism and those doubts.

Hermanus' film is quite, quite good, in fact. Much of that is thanks to the performance from Bill Nighy, who plays the bureaucrat with a terminal diagnosis, but those who know the source material will also know that, while the character is the essential component of this tale, his presence within the story isn't a guarantee at a certain point. That's one of the things that made the original film such a bold piece of storytelling in the first place, and the filmmakers are wise enough to recognize how important the third act is to this tale. After all, it's not just the story of a dying man looking for a way to give meaning and purpose to the final months of his life. It's also about whether or not he accomplished that goal and, if so, how he did and, on a larger scale, if it actually does mean anything.

Much of the credit for this film's maintenance of the narrative and thematic integrity of the source material goes to Hermanus, of course. On a more foundational level, though, it belongs to novelist and occasional screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, whose screenplay smartly re-adjusts and condenses the original script to fit a new setting and to narrow the story's focus. That he does both of those things without making it seem like a gimmick or losing the emotional and philosophical payoff is quite the accomplishment.

Nighy plays a man known only as Williams, the head bureaucrat in a department filled with them, surrounded by other local government departments filled with their own paper-pushers. We meet him and this world of unproductive but repetitive work by way of Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), a young man whom Williams recently hired and who still believes that government can work for ordinary people in need.

His first assignment, which is to take a group of women around the labyrinth building and through seemingly no end of denials, dissuades him of that thought quickly. The women want a bombing site (The film is a set in London less than a decade after the end of World War II) cleaned up of rubble and sewage by the county government, so that, ideally, the same government can build a playground for the local children, who have nothing of the sort in the neighborhood.

With that established and held for a long beat of existential despair and uncertainty, the story switches to Williams, who leaves work early—for likely the first time in his career—for a personal matter. It's to see his doctor, who has run some tests and has the worst news he can give Williams. Williams has cancer, and he will surely die from the disease in a matter of six months to a year.

With that, Williams stops going into work, struggles how to tell his son Michael (Barney Fishwick) about the diagnosis (The adult child lives in his father's house with his wife, played by Patsy Ferran), and withdraws a large sum of cash for an impromptu holiday to a seaside resort town he had always wanted to visit. There, he makes a quick acquaintance with Sutherland (Tom Burke), who tries to show the dying old man how to live it up with drinking, at various bars and clubs, and with little worry for whatever the future might bring.

Obviously, Williams' little adventure isn't the end of his story—or even the beginning of it, since there's really no lesson in such frivolous pursuits (a lesson unto itself, of course) and the real point can't be made until, well, the actual ending of Williams' story. In the meantime, Williams keeps delaying telling anyone, even his son, about his fate and strikes up a friendship with the much-younger Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), formerly of his department but looking for management position at a restaurant. It is a friendship—just and only that—although Williams does have an ulterior motive for spending as much time as he can with Margaret: He's convinced she actually knows how to live, considering how joyful she always is (Wood embodies that bright spirit, while also letting us know that the old man is only seeing what he wants to see about the character).

It's really that simple—again, until the third act—and straightforward. The meaning, though, is in the rhythm (how the partying with Sutherland and the repeated meetings with Margaret start to feel as mundane and repetitive as the early scenes at the government office), between the lines of what Williams wants and how he sets out to get it and how disappointing it all is, and, naturally, in Nighy's performance.

The actor, capable of displaying limitless charisma and channeling such an easygoing manner, does away with those qualities—until, as if the rest of this phrase needs to be said at this point, the third act—to portray a perfectly ordinary man realizing how ordinarily dull and without purpose his life has been. There's an overwhelming sadness in watching this man try to die with dignity—not because it's in his nature, but because it's what is expected of him as a gentleman and what he has come to expect of himself.

How this unfolds with that third act will remain undisclosed here for the uninitiated. For those who know the source material however, that third act remains as distinct, affecting, and filled with larger implications about, as well as condemnations of, human nature as it was in the original film. Living is a significant gamble, but because the filmmakers trust the strength of what they have, it pays off in thoughtful and emotionally potent ways.

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