After having watched a couple movies that filter existential angst through the eyes of donkeys that unceremoniously meet their demise and then the malevolence of the ugly tourists in Brandon Cronenberg's latest, I was in the mood for something more upbeat and affirming of life.
While I caught a trailer for Living a couple weeks back, it didn't really make much of an impression on me. However, when I heard that it was a remake of a Kurosawa film, I reconsidered. That Kurosawa film is Ikuru and, although I know of it, I've never seen it.
It is 1953 and Bill Nighy plays Rodney Williams, a taciturn mid-level(?) manager type in the Public Works department or ministry who is always clad in pinstripe suit and bowler hat. He has a coterie of much younger minions who report to him that seem a little afraid of their inscrutable boss. At home, he lives with his son, Michael, and his daughter-in-law, Fiona. The young couple tend to keep Rodney at arms length and are eager to get their hands on some of the money he has stashed away.
Upon receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Rodney heads to a seaside resort town that is completely unlike the one in Infinity Pool for one last hurrah before killing himself. (I assume this city was Blackpool because it's the only such place with arcades and whatnot that I know of in England thanks to Jethro Tull lyrics.) He is unable to do so and returns home determined not to live out his final days in quiet desperation.
Instead he helps out a trio of women who seek to have a bombed out building turned into a playground. They're lost in the ministry's bureaucratic maze and Rodney takes up their cause as his own. He also spends time with Margaret Harris, a young woman who was formerly one of his minions but left for an exciting career in the food service industry. There's nothing sexual between them. Rather Rodney, a widower, wants to spend a little time with a pretty young woman and perhaps absorb some of her vivaciousness so that his life may end on a bang instead of a whimper.
The plot here is straightforward and the movie is not particularly ostentatious stylistically so it's actors who get the focus. (One exception here is the 4:3 aspect ratio which evokes, along with the opening credits, early TV shows.) Nighy does a fine job of going from rather laconic and staid to someone animated by purpose with stops at pity and drunkenness in between.
While there is a certain formalistic simplicity here, there is still much food for thought. The bowler hatted figure is, for me, the subject of many a Monty Python sketch. I've always known it as something to be ridiculed. That came to mind when contemplating the movie's less than favorable commentary on government bureaucracy.
I also kept in mind that England (and Japan, for that matter) were very different places than the United States in 1953. The U.S. was ascendant with an emerging middle class eager to use fancy new appliances, eat at McDonald's, and consume consume consume. England, on the other hand, still had food rationing at the time.
Beyond these kinds of differences, the call to, well, carpe diem is timeless. The movie also implores us to live purposefully, to not be resigned to simply be carried along by tides but rather to tack our own course.
Living has more breadth of themes than depth, on the whole, although it does do some justice to the question of how to live. Despite this, I found it to be engaging and hopeful, the latter not being a part of my cinematic diet lately.
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