Living (2022)
The embattled Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) struggles to remain circumspect in Living
This is a confoundingly beautiful movie about achieving redemption before life can be snatched away. When devastation has to be faced, what happens when a man looks within himself and comes up empty?
What’s he been doing all these years if he hasn’t been living?
This brutally ironic, yet sometimes witty and bracing, story has been adapted by the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (who moved with his family from Japan to England when he was five).
His tight yet sinuous script is a brilliant quasi-adaptation of the acclaimed Japanese movie Ikiru (1952), which was masterfully directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Borrowing but never stealing from Ikiru, Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus show us the final days of a stoical office manager, Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy), from more than one vantage point, as if slowly revealing the facets of a jewel.
As this movie came on screen, I was quickly drawn in by the rich color scheme and the meticulous period detail. It’s set in early 1950s England, when that nation, recovering from WWII, seemed bent on re-establishing regularity and decorum.
As happened in British movies of the period, here, across the opening montage of a busy central London, the performing and producing credits appear onscreen in large, old-fashioned type.
The framing and cutting are deliberately stodgy, yet in the crowded street scenes we sense a vitality resurfacing in the populace, like a shared sigh of relief.
Mr. Williams – I don’t recall hearing his first name mentioned – is a senior civil servant so mired in his office’s mountains of paperwork that his life seems suspended between his In and Out boxes.
Is the tightly wound Mr. Williams sharing the nation’s post-war resurgence? One doesn’t quite see how he could be.
An unwavering dedication to the travails of bureaucracy continues to ossify Mr. Williams, without his having realized it’s been happening. He’s long ago lost the distinction between duty and drudgery.
He and five colleagues, four dour men and one cheerful young woman, Margaret (Amy Lou Wood), are surrounded by piles of paperwork in the Public Works Dept. It’s one warren in a towering municipal building containing still more offices crammed with public servants tediously keeping London County Council records.
Yet for all the seeming drabness, the cinematography’s teasingly oversaturated colors keep the scenes pulsing.
Bowler-hatted and clad in severe navy pinstripe, with his male subordinates punctiliously copying his attire, Mr. Williams scrupulously reins in his feelings, which they, in turn, don’t dream of disturbing.
But we’re not being offered social history here. The movie isn’t pondering how England will recover. It’s assuming it will.
Within that broad national rehabilitation, it’s rescuing the tragic tale of one man ensnared in and fighting through a stifling bureaucracy.
But those bright colors in the streets, and Margaret’s flaming blouses, suggest we’re eventually going to get closer to the lonely old man’s beating heart.
To make it there, we have to join Mr. Williams on a cautionary journey. Perhaps we’ll see him relax, open up, even take a few fretless deep breaths.
On the day we meet him, to the utter surprise of his staff he leaves work early (at a shocking 3:20pm). Quite unlike him, they all note.
Visiting his doctor, Mr. Williams receives shattering news. Tests confirm that this lifelong public servant has perhaps six, but no more than nine, months left to live.
We watch as the terror on Nighy’s face pitches Mr. Williams into a downward spiral. He’s speechless, but his eyes scream.
Rather than returning to the office the next day, Mr. Williams shuns work for a while, which for him amounts to running amok. He withdraws half his life savings and ventures to Brighton to risk doing something “daring”.
In a café he meets Sutherland (Tom Burke), a bohemian writer, and shares with him the painful news of his cancer diagnosis.
Moved by this frail old man’s despair, Sutherland suggests they temporarily throw off sadness and plunge into a night of carousing. In the whirl of their hearty partying, a thief nabs Mr. Williams’ bowler hat, which he quickly replaces with a sleek homburg.
Sutherland wonders aloud: Does this purchase mean Mr. Williams is readying a new image, a new self, to present to the world in his final months?
That could be true, we think. But doesn’t he first have to bring to life his old self? How to manage that?
Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) shares a lavish lunch with Margaret (Amy Lou Wood) in Living
Back in London, he comes across Margaret, who’s moved on to a new job, and begins an innocent fling with her, taking her on long walks, getting her to accompany him to old movies, treating her to lunch in a posh restaurant. She warns him that their brief idyll, lovely as she finds it, looks inappropriate, and he reluctantly agrees to step away.
Under his new hat, he boldly returns to the office. To the astonishment of his staff — knowing, as his colleagues don’t, that his time is limited — he takes up a worthy local cause that’s become hopelessly tangled in the city’s bureaucracy.
A handful of dedicated community women want a neglected parcel of land to be transformed into a playground.
Is that too much to ask of their government? They’re peeved at being shunted from department to department, put off by bureaucrat after bureaucrat.
Dying man to the rescue. Can Mr. Williams redeem what he now sees as a hollow, wasted life by pulling off a final act of public good?
He presses his subordinates into service. Most, under their bowler hats, are puzzled by Mr. Williams’ zeal. But not Peter (Alex Sharp), the newest member of the department, who since he’s come on board has been more intrigued than put off by Mr. Williams’ solemnity.
Peter keeps us hanging on when most think they’ve solved the Williams conundrum.
Peter (Alex Sharp) keeps a compassionate, thoughtful eye on Mr. Williams in Living
This is a visually splendid picture, easily one of the handsomest of the year, while keeping its beauties fastidiously pointed and elegant.
And what beauties! There are ravishing shots of trains rushing through the English countryside, bustling city streets, living rooms and parlors so warmly lit the people cozying in them seem to be slowly rebuilding optimism.
Throughout, Sandy Powell’s meticulous costumes, looking both lived-in and attractive, snugly situate strivers within the pecking order of a changing Britain.
Still, let’s get a grip. Marvelous as the production looks, a bit of retrograde boosterism is surely going on here. In fact, England saw rationing, severe housing shortages and widespread worker unrest after WWII, with some of those hardships festering into the early ’60s.
But we’re not being offered social history here. The movie isn’t pondering how England will recover. It’s assuming it will.
Within that broad national rehabilitation, it’s rescuing the tragic tale of one man ensnared in and fighting through a stifling bureaucracy.
His country, though it relies on him, barely sees him. Yet isn’t it true that he and his colleagues rather like it that way? The movie asks whether bureaucracies will ever reform themselves and tackle national problems on a massive scale.
That excellent question is cleverly posed, but not fully answered. The chances don’t seem good. Bureaucracies like their facelessness. Their indwellers can stay hidden and quietly watch their pensions accumulate.
Which means the movie doesn’t scold the country for its hypocrisy as much as it indicts human indifference to the plight of others, in good times or bad.
We know that such turning away, unlike bowler hats, hasn’t gone out of fashion.
Which is what makes Nighy’s performance so heartbreaking in today’s world. Mr. Williams is dying from a heartache no government could ease. He stopped living long before he fell fatally ill. And as he says, he didn’t see the catastrophe happening until it was too late.
Nighy’s voice is so painfully slowed and lowered, his posture made so immaculately wearied and tentative, that Mr. Williams doesn’t seem to be entirely present from the moment we first observe him.
I’ve never seen Nighy’s acting this minimalist or more powerful. He converts a man’s pain into a relentless, exquisite extinction, almost as if, unable to intervene, we’re witnessing him battle fate itself.
But Nighy keeps the slow capitulation stubbornly un-histrionic. With this performance he seems to be insisting that a flickering life needn’t entail a loss of dignity.
So, we’re left to gather — recalling the title of Ishiguro’s fine, discerning novel — the remains of the day.
That is, to grant ourselves a good, close look at a man whose abiding sorrow hasn’t annihilated his decency. Maybe the best and bravest response to a life in abeyance is our own better, more intense, living.