Bill Nighy proves that ‘subtly devastating’ is not an oxymoron in the beautifully painted film Living.
Bill Nighy proves that ‘subtly devastating’ is not an oxymoron in the beautifully painted film Living.
I love me some films about painfully repressed Englishmen. Fade in on an umbrella-toting, bowler-wearing, pleasure-rejecting, granite-faced member of the starched-underpants brigade, and I’m hooked. Think of a movie about a safecracker: You know the box will get opened, and it’s delicious to wonder how. Oh, and Bill Nighy is my favorite actor. So guess whether I liked Nighy’s new one, in which he plays a rigidly correct Fifties bureaucrat who hasn’t smiled since V.E. Day.
I’d walk eight miles through a swamp of toe fungus to watch Nighy read the weather report, and the actor’s impeccable taste in material does not disappoint in Living, an entry in this year’s (virtual) Sundance Film Festival about a career civil servant’s attempts to embrace life upon learning he has terminal cancer.
Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a sort of paperwork mortician in the London civil service: He presides over a permit-granting institution where ideas go to die. Very serious men in very serious clothes do much quiet frowning over various proposals, but the whole point of a bureaucracy like this is to provide reasons why nothing can be done about anything. When a group of housewives comes in with a proposal to turn a bomb-ravaged empty lot into a playground for their children, the idea seems about as likely to be approved as neon signage at Buckingham Palace.
The only spark of life provided by anyone is in the eyes and smile of a young clerk, Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), who doesn’t fit in among these studiously gray men and announces that she is leaving to work in a restaurant. Everyone else makes Bob Cratchit look like a Sex Pistol.
Excusing himself to leave the office slightly early one day — is this even proper? — Williams sees a doctor who hints that his time is nearly up. These things are difficult, the doctor mentions. “Quite,” says Williams. He skips work and goes to a seaside resort in the interest of living a little. But as he crushingly explains to a stranger who befriends him in a café, “I realized I don’t know how.”
Watching Williams learn provides the movie with its heart. Nighy, who is never not great, is stellar, even spellbinding. His character is so clamped-down that Nighy has very little room in which to maneuver, and yet he maps out the contours of this fellow’s starved and aching soul with all sorts of textures and colors. In an especially devastating scene among many, he stuns a chatty barroom into silence by singing an old Scottish ballad.
“Living” is the English word for ikiru, the title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Japanese drama about the same situation happening to a civil servant in the Japan of the time (and loosely based on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). The Japan-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro has rewritten Ikiru’s script while including many of the same scenes and characters, this time with the focus on the strange rituals of English repression that provided a rich vein of sorrow in his novel The Remains of the Day.
As directed by another non-U.K. native, Oliver Hermanus of South Africa, Living imagines mid-century England as a kind of cathedral of propriety where everyone is a reverent parishioner drawn to worship by the beautiful solemnity of it all. Living improves on Ikiru in several respects; the loose dialogue that strayed into overt explanation in the earlier movie is tightly packed with meaning in the remake, and the new film’s elegant look makes the low-budget original look drab and cramped.
Adding to the richness of his images, Hermanus says much about what’s going on beneath the surface by marshaling a soundtrack full of lush classical music whose sweep suggests the unseen pains and sorrows the English felt duty-bound to conceal, even from themselves. The effect reminded me of the emotionally engorged documentaries of Terence Davies, such as his extraordinary memory film about postwar Liverpool Of Time and the City, one of the most affecting love letters to one’s hometown ever put on film.
Except for a somewhat maudlin turn toward the end, Ishiguro and Hermanus maintain an exquisite restraint that keeps the audience wrapped up in the fate of a nobody. As played by Nighy, Mr. Williams is not a mere type, or a figure of fun, but a man doing what everyone must — attempt to organize the facts of his life into some kind of meaning before it ends. By being highly specific, Living paints a stirring portrait of an Everyman.