Bill Nighy Makes Slow Kurosawa Remake Living Worth the Effort

This review originally ran as part of Paste’s Sundance Film Festival 2022 coverage.

From the creaky, throwback colors of the opening credits to Oliver Hermanus’ Living, the filmmaker’s take on Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is upfront about its nostalgic approach to the serious material. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) is not a modern man in any sense. He’s a bit of a relic even in his post-WWII London, a stoic chasing the grand gentleman ideal to the detriment of his own happiness. Nobel-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro adapts the beloved examination of mortality with a specifically British bent, giving Nighy room for an understated and impactful performance while perhaps too deeply attributing the movie’s larger philosophical points to a stiff and overly restrained national identity.

Williams works for the government, leading his Public Works team as they dither their respective stacks of papers from column A to column B. The youthful energies of newcomer Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp) and the department’s sole female employee Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) can barely power a few jokey remarks in such a soul-sucking environment. They wither under hard stares from joyless bureaucrats, whose shared day-to-day seems to involve passing whatever buck might foolishly land on their desks. It’s a depressing labyrinth, erected as a testament to futility and observed through a montaged tour Wakeling gives a group of women hoping to turn a local cesspool into a playground. Jaunty piano accompanies the fruitless run-around, the discordant juxtaposition as jarring as the series of department heads that greet inquiring members of the public with deeply polite, extremely British versions of “fuck off.”

This is the wheel-spinning world in which Williams is lord and ruler, his power and money meaning nothing as he learns that he will not sit atop its self-limited mediocrity for much longer. Williams has a terminal illness and spends Living looking his dwindling life in the eye. It’s an inherently melodramatic notion, one that’s sentimentality would be overpowering if not for Nighy’s dignified restraint. He’s shot as a statue, still and stoic and sometimes framed from the neck up, as if his wizened face was on a coin rather than a buttoned-up body. Even his composure, interrupted with long-gestating tremors of repressed despair, cannot completely ground the film’s anglicized rendition of “Live Like You Were Dying.”