Living

Taps for "Mr. Zombie"

or

First, Do No Harm

 

An anglicized version of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote "The Remains of the Day")—which was itself an adaptation of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and directed by Oliver Hermanus, the least one can say about Living is that it does it source proud.

 

Living begins with vintage footage of 1950's London, which will slowly transition from grainy home-movie shots of anonymous footage of bustling city by-ways to, finally, landing on images of individuals rather than merely sartorially-clad ants scurrying in landscapes of blanched stone. One notices that the footage is in the "Kodak" square ratio (1.48:1), fitting the period, and never leaves it because, let's face it, the story doesn't deserve wide-screen. There are no picturesque vistas, no grand horizons, no snakes or parades or any of the other subjects that require a movie-screen to stretch. Just people. And a box is more than enough space for that.

It's certainly enough for Rodney Williams (Bill Nighy—being touted for a "career-best performance", but I think is, rather, a sterling example of an artist doing as little as possible and getting the maximum effect). Mr. Williams is a bureaucrat in the London County Council, where he does (appropriately) "as little as possible" and shuffles paper for projects that no one in any of the divisions wants to deal with. More often than not, he will be given a file, sent from another department that has been forwarded in the chain, and he will merely file it, with a non-committal "We can keep it here. It will do no harm."

It will, in fact, do nothing at all. The files that surround his little division are derisively nick-named "sky-scrapers" by his group (but not within Mr. Williams' hearing, who is also derisively nick-named "the old man"—even that is not so colorful and merely generic). Williams will assign underlings to deal with requests, where they will travel up the circuitous stair-cases of the building only to be dismissed in another office as "not the appropriate office" and the shuffling begins anew. Until, of course, it comes to rest, where it "will do no harm." Such is the everyday life of a British bureaucrat in the increasingly oxymoronic "Public Works". The uniform of suit and derby, the commute by train, the shuffling.

Unless it's the shuffling off of one's mortal coil. Williams announces to his staff that he will, unusually, be leaving early on this one day—so sorry for the bother, but can't be helped—and Williams goes off to his doctor's office. There is no blunt foreshadowing in the waiting room (as per this week's scene), merely the chilly call to the office and the pronouncement of limitations. "It's never easy, this" says the doctor, who gives him six more months. Williams pauses and as an acknowledgment of the doctor's pain and not his own says only one word. "Quite."

He will tell no one, not his son, nor his daughter-in-law, his co-workers, although he rehearses the act, always with the proviso "it's such a bore." He will do something uncharacteristic in the first days of his last days—he takes half his savings, buys a deadly amount of sleep medication and goes on a brief holiday (not even informing his co-workers), where during a breakfast, he will meet a young artist (Tom Burke) with insomnia and make a pact: he will offer his medications to the young man if he will show him how to "live a little" "I don't know how," he offers.

He will learn. A little. In the little time he has left.

 

It's a small incident, tentative, as is the entire film, but explores risk, as will the rest of the film. The risks he takes a small, insignificant, but not to him, and will have small repercussions, ultimately, in the scheme of things. But, not to him. I've been doing a small feature here, which I call "Walking Kurosawa's Road" because I've found in my viewings of the Japanese master-director, an impenetrable "something" that has always left me unmoved. The series has only covered Kurosawa's work before Rashomon—where, suddenly, the world discovered him—but, I've seen many, many of his films and, of all of them, Ikiru (the film on which Living is based) is my favorite...so far.

Living is close to it—it doesn't have Kurosawa's brutal, almost cruel, honesty, replacing it with a British reserve, and it chose to leave out the gangsters (although, they might have done if William's trip had been to Brighton Rock), but it does remain true to its source, that being Tolstoy. Kurosawa took Tolstoy's themes and crafted something original and Living merely transposes it to the Britain of the same era. And although the settings and cultures are far afield, the sentiment, the universality—the humanness—is still there, shining humbly, whether one lives in Moscow or Tokyo or London...or Timbuktu, for that matter.

Rather than kvetch that Living is merely a remake—Kurosawa has had many Western remakes (sometimes literally) of his work—one should appreciate how cinema—good cinema and good story-telling—can show us our commonality and what unites us, rather than what divides us.

 

Living does so, exquisitely.