Adapted from Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, itself inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Living is about death.
Rodney Williams, played by Nighy, is a bureaucrat in charge of a council department. He’s apathetic and going through the motion, pushing papers into piles without any intention of taking something on.
His desk is the opposite of a clearing house, everything goes there to die.
When Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, he’s shaken out of his zombified stupor. But it’s not a wake-up call in the way that it’s been portrayed in countless other stories. He doesn’t just go bungee jumping or call up on ex-girlfriend.
Like the movie itself, it’s a slower path to realisation, and Williams goes through different emotional stages of grieving the life he hasn’t yet lost, but also the life he could’ve lived. Just like the piles of paper on his desk, he’s been going nowhere.
After absconding from work and taking himself somewhere out of character, he forms a friendship with a former colleague, a young woman named Miss Harris, played by Aimee Lou Wood.
To Williams, Miss Harris has a natural verve and engagement with her present, something he has denied to himself. In these twilight weeks, he wants to understand how to capture some of that same spirit, or even to understand how he can experience life without a grey shroud.
The beauty of Nighy’s performance is that it is so subtle and yet so effective. The modulations between detachment and sadness aren’t always obvious but in Nighy’s hands, he takes you on that journey.
He’s doing incredibly difficult work by making it seem effortless. Nighy clearly has deep compassion for Williams, and for that character’s journey to finally connecting with everything and everyone around him.
It’s what makes Living a more interesting proposition than it could’ve been.
The film itself boasts rich production design for its 1950s setting and Wood is an amiable complement to Nighy’s energy. But Nighy’s performance – and Ishiguro’s script – elevates an otherwise humdrum movie.
