The stakes of remaking a movie that was panned or forgotten are relatively low, but remaking a masterpiece is setting yourself up for a deliberate challenge, almost like taking on a dare. The new film Living sets itself up for inevitable comparison by its very existence, an adaptation of beloved auteur Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru. Though it’s faithful to its inspiration — which was itself inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich — the film is the product of another singular creative voice with its own distinct sensibility: Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro, the mind behind novels like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.
Though their genres and locales differ, Living is in some ways similar to A Fistful of Dollars or The Magnificent Seven before it, films that translated the works of Kurosawa to a new context more than it outright reinvented them. Ishiguro and his collaborative partner, director Oliver Hermanus, swap Japan of the early 1950s for England of the same era. The two societies of the time express a spiritual kinship, despite having just been on opposite sides of a brutal conflict, as both sift through the metaphorical and literal rubble of World War II.
At the center is a man who, much like the world around him, clings tight to the normalcy of bureaucratic operations. Mr. Williams, played to tender effect by Bill Nighy — who received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance here — is a department head within London’s Public Works department, a Kafkaesque labyrinth of towering paperwork and dreary eyes, where everyone continues with business as usual despite the regular interruptions of a malfunctioning air-raid siren, a wailing banshee left over from the war.
Much like Stevens, the butler from Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Williams is a solemn operator guarded by strict ritual. A terminal diagnosis shatters Williams’ rigidity, sending him first into a dark period of soul-searching, and then toward a renewed sense of purpose, as the final months of his life take on new meaning. Nighy brings a remarkable sense of physicality to the role, as a man who is at once both absent and present, always shrinking himself until he becomes a ghost on the edges of the frame. His words are chosen precisely, every movement of his frame governed by a lifetime of routine. Nighy’s is the kind of rare performance that transcends mere believability; you truly feel the weariness of the years in each breath, and in the stillness that hangs between his utterances.
What separates something like Living from the countless hokey “feel-good” films about men in their twilight years learning to love life again — say, The Bucket List, or the recent Tom Hanks vehicle A Man Called Otto — is not just its period setting and remarkable lead performance, but a more complicated structure. As much as the story of Mr. Williams, if not even more so, Living is the story of those around him, drawn from memories, recollections and private moments that offer differing perspectives on a deceptively complicated individual. Recalling another Kurosawa classic, the second half of the film has an almost Rashomon-like structure, as Williams’ former colleagues come together, each with their own remembrances of the man. Living has an investigative air, though not a mystery in the conventional sense; its characters experience the mental questioning and emotional detective work that can occur after the death of a loved one, as we sift through the pieces of their existence and reckon with the selves we can never truly know.
Despite the difference in context, Ishiguro’s screenplay is surprisingly faithful to its source, and at times maybe too reverent. There’s even a kind of visual faithfulness to the original. Like Ikiru, Living is filmed in a 1:33:1 aspect ratio, the industry standard in 1952 but a distinct artistic decision 70 years later. The slightly boxy frame, along with a richly tinted color palette, gives one the feeling of looking into a memory, as scenes from life are played out in a shadowbox.
Living never quite reaches the raw emotion of Kurosawa’s original film, keeping itself at a distance from the audience. Ikiru is a period piece only in retrospect, made as a contemporary film that reckoned with an ongoing project of natural soul-searching, while Living is purposefully set in the past, set at a deliberate remove. That might temper the intensity of the viewing experience, but Living isn’t an academic exercise in adaptation. Bill Nighy brings to life a character whose presence is felt by the film’s characters even after his death, and whose essence carries on with the audience once the lights come up.
