“Ikiru” (1952) was one of the great Akira Kurosawa’s quieter masterpieces. I remember that it never gained the public’s embrace like Kurosawa’s stunning, action-filled works “Seven Samurai,” “Throne of Blood,” and “Rashomon” did. But I will always recall the poignant, indelible portrait of the film’s death—haunted protagonist Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura’s offers a painfully theatrical performance), a repressed civil servant who is forced to confront the nature of his life facing his looming death from stomach cancer.
The English remake follows the original very closely, though it’s less given to exposition (no narrator) and much less savage in its attack on the bureaucracy. It was scripted by Nobel Prize winning Kazuo Ishiguro, and is set in 1950s London with a subdued, though refined, Bill Nighy (as Mr. Williams) taking on the central role as the formal head of a municipal London Council planning department. He lives an emotionally submerged, tedious life with his passive, uncommunicative son and grasping daughter-in-law, who seem to be only concerned with their inheritance. The film is directed with visual imagination and meticulous care by Oliver Hermanus, who uses a variety of camera angles, deep shadows, mirror shots, and elegant framing to capture the robotic, routinized quality of Mr. Williams’ world of bowler-hatted, pinstripe-suited suburban bureaucrats.
Mr. Williams’ first attempt on his journey to find an alternative life to the one he has led as a dutiful bureaucrat is to accompany a decadent writer (Tom Burke) on a wild pub-crawl, strip club night in Brighton that ultimately provides Williams with little pleasure.
His second step at breaking from the stifling tedium that has been his existence is when he becomes platonically infatuated with a young woman, Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), from his office, who has fled the boredom of the job for working as a waitress in a chain restaurant—a Lyons House (far from an idyll). She is sweet, cheery, and innocent, and Williams loosens up in her presence. You can see in these scenes that, all his life, Williams has submerged another part of himself that has a capacity for pleasure and a sympathetic wit. We learn that his calm is more a veneer that he has adopted than a reality.
His journey ends as he decides to finally make his work meaningful, not just a matter of endless days of pushing dusty papers around. He takes a plan for a small playground brought by a group of East End women, who had been given a bureaucratic runaround by his department and others for many weeks, and works hard for it to come to fruition. He does it with a force of will and urgency and commitment to making some lives better that he has never displayed before.
The film concludes with the same memorable, melancholy scene as the original, where Williams is alone at night on a swing in the new playground he helped construct. Snow comes down as Williams sings a song from his childhood. Both Nighy and Shimura in the original film give luminous performances. Kurosawa’s film is the more powerful of the two, but the remake is fine as well. Obviously, the oppressiveness of bureaucracy, and trying to provide meaning to one’s life when facing death are far from fresh themes, but in the hands of Nighy, the director Hermanus, and scriptwriter Ishiguro, the film still resonates deeply.
