Oliver Hermanus (2022)
Although Living is his first screenplay in seventeen years, Kazuo Ishiguro seems particularly well qualified to translate Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) into an English setting. The child of Japanese parents, Ishiguro lived his first five years in Nagasaki before his father’s work took the family to England, where they stayed. In his best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro explores British codes of behaviour and suppression of emotion from an insider-outsider perspective – the perspective of someone born into a different culture that’s subject to a similarly well-defined social rulebook. Like the novel’s protagonist, Kurosawa’s Watanabe has worked in the same job for decades – as a bureaucrat in Tokyo rather than a butler in an English stately home – and, nearing the end of his life, is forced to wonder how much of it he has wasted. The same fate is in store for the main character in Living, also a civil servant. These two men – and Stevens, the butler in Remains – share, too, a form of address: each, in keeping with his modus vivendi, is a Mr rather than a first name. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Mr Williams (Bill Nighy) in Oliver Hermanus’s film goes further in this direction than the other two. Whereas the cast lists for Ikiru and James Ivory’s screen version of The Remains of the Day (1993) give a forename to Watanabe and Stevens (Kanji and James respectively), Mr Williams is just Mr Williams. Although he’s also ‘Father’ to his son, Michael (Barney Fishwick), Williams is more individual by virtue of his office sobriquet. He’s known as ‘Mr Zombie’ – ‘sort of dead but not dead’, in the words of a junior colleague.
He’s not quite zomboid but Bill Nighy looks more cadaverous than ever. In the early scenes, his well-judged underplaying does a lot to convey the spirit of Williams’s place of work, the London County Council offices. (I assume location shooting took place in the actual County Hall building; at any rate, the staircases and corridors do a nice job of suggesting labyrinthine bureaucracy.) On his first day in the office where Williams is the oldest member of staff, young Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp) is advised by Margaret Harris (Aimée Lou Wood) against clearing his desk and thus giving the impression he hasn’t enough work to do. Although Living retains Ikiru‘s early post-war setting, the eye-catching in-trays reminded me of working in London University’s Senate House in the early 1980s and an experienced colleague there: Mary was diligent and competent but understood the sense in keeping her desk stacked with, in her words, ‘great tottering piles of rubbish’. The film’s opening credits are accompanied by shots of central London shops and traffic, colour footage whose visual texture Jamie D Ramsay’s cinematography manages to echo in subsequent street scenes. The lighting and dimensions of the suburban home that widowed Williams shares with his son and daughter-in-law, Fiona (Patsy Ferran), are expressive, too – the house is crepuscular, comfortable yet poky. It’s just the right environment for a creature of habit about to learn from a GP (Jonathan Keeble) that his days are numbered.
Yet Living (a good forty minutes shorter than its inspiration, by the way) disappoints, and for reasons to do with Ishiguro’s script as well as Oliver Hermanus’s shaky direction. I’m assuming that Ishiguro admires the Kurosawa original: in large part, he keeps its structure but his departures from it are unsuccessful in themselves and confusing because of what’s been retained. Ikiru is decidedly episodic. After learning he has stomach cancer, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) decides to seize the day. He makes the acquaintance of an eccentric would-be writer who inducts him into Tokyo night life. He then strikes up a friendship with Toyo, a young woman in his office who’s about to leave for a factory job. Neither is in the story for long. Ishiguro also has a louche, off-the-wall writer, Sutherland (Tom Burke), who introduces Williams to the fleshpots of Bournemouth rather than London. Toyo’s equivalent is Margaret Harris, who leaves LCC, with a reference from Williams, for a job in a Lyon’s Corner House (supposedly as assistant manager, actually as a put-upon ‘nippy’). But whereas Sutherland duly disappears once he and Williams have visited a strip club and a pub, where (as in Ikiru) the dying man sings a song that will be heard again, Margaret is in the film throughout.
Ikiru is always and only Watanabe’s story (even when he’s dead). Ishiguro wants other viewpoints – Margaret’s is one, Peter Wakeling’s another. But these two, like everyone in Living except for Williams, are thinly written characters. Peter (who has no opposite number in Ikiru) also stays in the picture; he and Margaret end up an item. Since they don’t amount to much as individuals – and Peter hardly interacts with Williams – this pairing off seems little more than narrative tidiness. As you watch the film, the Bournemouth episode, because it’s unconnected to what follows (save for the reprise of Williams’s singing ‘The Rowan Tree’), feels like a mistake yet its self-containedness is truer to Ikiru than is Living’s use of Margaret and Peter. Kurosawa’s film is introduced by an unidentified male voiceover, which speaks unsympathetically about Watanabe’s unfulfilling existence. In keeping with the film’s other elements, the voiceover doesn’t persist but its harsh authority is a clever tactic, directing us to see Watanabe immediately as someone ‘simply passing time without actually living his life’. This, in combination with his widowed state and his chilly son, keeps us from wondering whether Watanabe didn’t find marriage and parenthood more fulfilling than pen-and-paper-pushing. In contrast, Living eschews voiceover and tends to humanise. Williams gazes regretfully at a photograph of his late wife. His son is a hen-pecked wimp rather than a cold fish.
The theme of keeping emotions and the truth in check, central to The Remains of the Day, is important here, too. It comes through effectively enough when Williams intends but fails to tell Michael about the stomach cancer and when Michael, despite his wife’s urgings, chickens out of demanding to know from his father what he was doing lunching in Fortnum and Mason with a woman young enough to be his daughter. This thread of the story is poorly plotted, though. It would be neater (as well as give Patsy Ferran, who’s wasted, slightly more to do) if Williams and Margaret Harris were spotted at lunch by the shrewish Fiona herself, rather than by a nosey neighbour who reports back to her. Fiona could also then have pointed Margaret out to Michael at Williams’s funeral. It makes no sense when, at the end of the church service, Michael introduces himself to Margaret and asks if she was aware, as he wasn’t, that his father was dying: we don’t know how Michael knows who Margaret is, let alone why he thinks this stranger might have been Williams’s confidante. It makes little more sense that Michael, when he asks Margaret this question, instantly starts to cry. What’s happened to his emotionally straitjacketed Englishness?
Ikiru takes the audience by surprise with the revelation, about halfway through, that its main character has died. Living follows suit then, also as in the original, devotes the remaining screen time to the hero’s obsequies and to describing, in flashback, the coming to fruition of what, in the last months of his life, becomes his raison d’être. Fearing death but heartened by Margaret’s youthful zest, Williams, like Watanabe, realises it’s not too late for him to achieve something useful. With great determination, he succeeds in doing just that: despite the bureaucratic obstacles imposed by his employer and the corrupt behaviour of other interested parties, he sees to it that a piece of waste ground is developed as a children’s playground, for the good of the local community. The later stages of Living follow Ikiru closely without looking to emulate its nicely ambiguous alcoholic touches. At Watanabe’s wake, his former colleagues come round to acknowledging his efforts in making the playground happen; the increasing amount of drink inside them helps towards this more generous point of view. Williams’s colleagues (Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris, Hubert Burton, Anant Varman), on the train journey back from the funeral, make a sober assessment of his merits. The policeman who witnesses Watanabe’s death, sitting on a swing in the snowy playground, reproaches himself for thinking the old man might have been drunk because he was singing to himself. Living’s bobby on the beat (Thomas Coombes) – recalling the event to Peter Wakeling when the latter visits the playground one night – describes Williams’s end in more conventional, tear-jerking terms.
Directing his first feature outside his native South Africa, Oliver Hermanus (Beauty (2011), Moffie (2019), etc) seems overawed by remaking what’s widely considered a film classic – it may not help that he’s working with a screenplay by a Nobel laureate. Although close-ups scrutinise Bill Nighy rewardingly, Hermanus moves in tight on others in the cast to counterproductive effect: under the pressure of the camera’s proximity, some of the supporting acting comes across as too deliberate. Living hasn’t been made as a thoroughgoing pastiche of films of the ration-book era but the woman who runs the Bournemouth café where Williams meets Sutherland is played (by Nicola McAuliffe) almost as a parody of Joyce Carey’s station-buffet manageress in Brief Encounter (1945). Hermanus also relies fitfully on antique visual clichés like a calendar page turning to signal the passage of time: since the calendar is in Williams’s office, the month change merely makes you wonder why the LCC isn’t troubling to investigate his lengthy, unaccustomed absence from work. The original music, by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, is various enough and sometimes lusciously tragic. This isn’t enough for Hermanus: in the final playground sequence, Williams’s frail rendition of ‘The Rowan Tree’ is superseded on the soundtrack by Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Making use of such fine, emotionally powerful music doesn’t excuse laying it on with a trowel. (Terence Davies’s recent Benediction also climaxes with the Vaughan Williams Fantasia but uses it more sensitively.)
Expanding the young woman’s role in the story is a mistake but Aimée Lou Wood is very likeable as Margaret and her reactions to Mr Williams always feel genuine. It’s Margaret who explains his office nickname – with a winning mixture of awkwardness and good-humoured candour that makes Williams grin. Although I’ve rarely enjoyed Bill Nighy in comedy, his funny bones, whenever they’re in evidence, serve Living well. His naturally funereal aspect works even better. For a piece that’s all about mortality, I found Ikiru somewhat evasive; Living is less so, thanks to Nighy. Without making a solemn big deal of it, his face often looks to be staring death in the face. I’d have been scared stiff seeing this film in my early teens but times have evidently changed. You’d think a story centred on terminal illness merited at least a ‘scenes of threat’ warning but death, where is thy sting? Living has a 12A certificate from the BBFC because of ‘moderate sex references’. In North America, it’s rated PG-13 for ‘some suggestive material and smoking’.
17 November 2022
