In Living, Bill Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a widowed London bureaucrat who becomes a changed man after learning he is not long for this world.Ross Ferguson/Courtesy of Number 9 films / Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media
- Living
- Directed by Oliver Hermanus
- Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film by Akira Kurosawa
- Starring Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood and Tom Burke
- Classification PG
- 102 minutes
Critic’s Pick
The right actor can save the wrong movie, time and again. Take Living, a misbegotten remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru (To Live) set in 1950s London that, while made with all the best intentions and ambitions by a supremely talented lot of artists, should not work. Yet it does, ultimately, thanks to the magnificent talents of its leading man, Bill Nighy.
The British actor, as prolific as he is dashing, has never quite been afforded as large a role and as towering a challenge as the ones he is offered in Living (no matter the dance moves he had to learn for Love, Actually, or the vampire makeup he had to cake on his face for the Underworld movies). Just as Kurosawa’s impeachable character study followed a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat determined to leave a lasting legacy before he died, director Oliver Hermanus’s remake follows Nighy’s Mr. Williams, a widowed London bureaucrat who becomes a changed man after learning he is not long for this world.
Aimee Lou Wood and Nighy in Living.Ross Ferguson/Courtesy of Number 9 films / Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media
With nothing left to lose except his long-repressed dreams and hopes, Mr. Williams begins acting out of character – disappearing from his office for long lunches, escaping to the seaside for a night, ignoring the whines of his selfish son and daughter-in-law, exploiting the loops in the needlessly rigid government system that he has long upheld – all in the quest to extract some joyful moments from what has been an otherwise dull and perhaps meaningless existence.
With a screenplay by celebrated author Kazuo Ishiguro – who has apparently long been fascinated with transporting Kurosawa’s original tale to postwar Britain – there was reason to be hopeful that Living would if not somehow transcend Ikiru then at least live up to it. Yet despite Ishiguro’s unparalleled talent for embracing and then dissecting the tiny, almost imperceptible moments that make up a life – and Hermanus’s admirable restraint in never ramping up any surface-level sentimentality – Living just doesn’t quite vault over its self-imposed challenges. Except, that is, when it comes to Nighy.
In Living, Nighy offers up a character and performance that you want to embrace with open arms.Ross Ferguson/Courtesy of Number 9 films / Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media
Playing Mr. Williams with a subtle kind of poetic spareness, the reed-thin actor offers up a character and performance that you want to embrace with open arms. Initially a cog in a starchy system designed for oppression and conformity, Mr. Williams slowly and carefully breaks out of his invisible chains to embrace the world around him that he has for so long ignored.
A lesser actor would make this switch look gleeful, silly, easy. Especially when paired with younger performers (Aimee Lou Wood as a more ambitious office mate, Tom Burke as a let-the-good-times-roll stranger) who don’t have to play under the same stiff-upper-lip restraints. Yet Nighy goes against expectations and perhaps even instinct at every turn, delivering a surprising and sincere act that lingers.
By the time Mr. Williams said his farewells, it was not exactly a hardship to say goodbye to the world in which he lived – the one that Hermanus and Ishiguro half-reconstructed from Kurosawa’s imagination. But it wasn’t nearly so easy letting go of Nighy. The man, and his performance, deserve to live forever.
Living opens in select theatres Jan. 20.
Barry Hertz