Living pushes prestige while rubber stamping a beating heart of its own
It didn't have to live up to Kurosawa's Ikiru but it also didn't have to be Netflix-lite
Living, UK, 2022, 102 mins - Drama - Starring Bill Nighy, Dir. Oliver Hermanus, screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, Prod. Co.: BFI
Generally, I dislike remakes, but I went into Living with high expectations, given its awards buzz and the fact that, like everyone, I've always loved Bill Nighy. So it was nice to see him leading a movie. Besides, Akira Kurosawa is basically responsible for western cinema in the first place: Star Wars, A Fistful of Dollars, The Magnificent Seven, hell, even Pixar's A Bug's Life all own much, if not everything, to the master.
Ikiru, though, is a different picture. You're not re-interpreting a great action movie and delivering new thrills to action-hungry audiences. Instead, it’s a personal drama, acutely observed and artfully directed. It’s one thing also to remake a recent small-scale foreign success such as Jake Gyllenhaal’s The Guilty, last year for Netflix, again an action-based film to feed the hungry beast that is streaming, but quite another to remake an all-time beloved classic of international cinema. The remake task, in this case, is closer to carbon-copying a person's soul to clone a legend. But as anyone who loves Highlander can attest, “there can be only one.”
In Living, Bill Nighy plays Williams, the manager of a civil service branch in London, set in the 1950s. He heads up his division of whisper-quiet rubber stampers, busy giving three ladies, in particular, the run around while shelving proposals of any innovation. His staff treats him with a great deal of deference, which extends to a complex pecking order even on the commuter train. Williams receives an unspecified grim diagnosis and decides not to go to work. Instead, he goes to the seaside and meets a younger man (with an uncanny resemblance to American actor Stacy Keach) to whom he gives away his prescription medication. The stranger takes him for a night on the town, where he discovers he’s not interested in convivial pleasures, or perhaps he would be if he could stay awake. At some point, he realizes he can do something about a proposition for a children’s playground put forth by the three ladies long since shelved. This becomes Williams’ cause célèbre as Nighy walks through the motions of circumventing red tape that usually prevents positive change from benefitting taxpayers. The rest of the film takes a particularly trite approach to parceling off Williams’ determined efforts in tidy bite-sized flashbacks.
Sadly, it wasn't long into this experience that my heart sank at this film’s approach. It feels like a streaming movie made on a television soundstage that condenses the sublimely staged, brilliantly directed, and culturally specific drama of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, which is tied to the post-war transformation of Japan, and plugging it into post-war England, ripping plot points wholesale from the original and dumbing them down for easy consumption. It x-rays a film resting on hallowed ground, stealing its bones but leaving all the flesh behind. It isn’t a remake infused with some creativity of its own, but instead something closer to straight plagiarism. In short, it takes a masterpiece of cinema and churns out something very close to schmaltz.
In Living, when the film steals the bold structural shift from the original at the midpoint, it is merely pasting on a paint-by-numbers approach instead of finding its own organic way forward. It would have been a braver choice for this film to stick to a linear narrative and allow us to live through Nighy's struggles precisely at the moment this film comes to life. But instead, that energy is neutered in favor of the established structure of the original. Defining its own framework would have elevated this film above the original if it cared to dramatize the lengths to which Nighy's character has to struggle against a mountain of immovable bureaucracy. But instead, like so much of today’s storytelling, heroic struggles are supplanted with magical endowments, which, oddly, is the last thing I expected to occur in a remake of a film that celebrates the last great thing a person did in their life against all odds of success.
Perhaps due to the audience's general lack of familiarity with the original, this film is being extolled as some great life-affirming experience. As such, it has garnered much critical praise and awards attention. However, compared to the original, it is a pale and lifeless facsimile devoid of any of the joys and celebrations of life that are so vibrantly captured in the original. This one feels as if it is sleepwalking through its proceedings. Meanwhile, a masterpiece, very much alive and fully restored, waits to unspool at the touch of a button on The Criterion Channel. A film that makes you value life and portrays the arduous struggle of its protagonist, instead of this sleepy movie that only made me wish it was over sooner.
In Ikiru, the viewer absorbs Kanji Watanabe’s massive undertaking and the stubborn patience and dogged determination he musters to achieve it. Played so beautifully by the towering Takashi Shimura, against whose wattage Bill Nighy, or any other western actor for that matter, can barely hold a candle. The Criterion liner notes state the film is “presented in a radically conceived two-part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, IKIRU is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.” This is an accurate assessment that could not be cross-applied to Living.
I wonder how many Oscar noms a remake of something with the western cultural status of It's a Wonderful Life would garner? Ikiru is equivalent in its stature. Living is barely worth being shown in cinemas, as it has all the ear markings of a streaming film with its tidy, saccharine-infused, soft-focused movie-lite aesthetics.
N.B. My take on this film is heavily influenced by my love of the original, affecting my ability to assess it independently. I am sure most viewers will have a mild to pleasant reaction to this film and perhaps not understand why I’m in such a tizzy about a relatively banal film. And if you have any nostalgia for or experience with the British lifestyle, you may even enjoy this film, given the numerous five-star reviews from across the pond. However, my review applies more directly to those cineastes among us who are weary of modern culture steamrolling over the past with a tendency to over-simplify matters and flatten out the original for generic consumption. Something I feel this film is particularly guilty of.
Rating:
2/5
(I would give it one star, but I don’t want to be that mean to Mr. Nighy.)
Thank you for reading! If you’ve seen Living, or when you do, please share your thoughts with me, as I’m curious how this film lands for others, especially those unfamiliar with the original. And for those of you who are, am I nuts for hating on this remake?
Many thanks for being here and supporting my writing. If it’s adding value to your movie-going, please share it with someone you think it may add value to.