Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: November 4th, 2022 (UK) / December 23rd, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Lionsgate / Sony Pictures Classics
Director(s): Oliver Hermanus
Writer(s): Kazuo Ishiguro / Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni (film Ikiru)

I don’t have time to get angry.

One shouldn’t set out to remake a classic of cinema lightly, so it’s nice to see that Oliver Hermanus’ Living (adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro) stays as true to the source as you could hope.

There are obviously differences both culturally (the third act at a drunken wake shifts to the next morning’s train ride) and narratively (this version is forty minutes shorter), but the melancholic spirit of inspiration remains. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) couldn’t allow himself to be that boy in the corner waiting to be called home any longer. He would make certain to force Death into waiting until he was done playing.

That in itself is a shift considering Ikiru’s Watanabe is sparked into action upon discovering his former employee was so happy because she was finally doing something that had meaning to her. Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) isn’t doing anything like that here—in fact, she’s not even doing what she thought she would upon leaving the Public Works office Williams oversaw.

It’s seeing her as a beacon of light outside that reminded him of those childhood days in the street from before the daily grind of the capitalist machine stripped away his hopeful optimism. And those childhood days that subsequently bring his mind back to the park those women proposed so many times only for him to perpetually bury it under a stack of papers.

It’s therefore a nice change insofar as removing “career” from the equation. The message is less about finding your purpose in work as much as in life. It just happens that Mr. Williams’ work can give it to him in this instance. You need that since Ikiru’s other messaging is ultimately pushed to the background this time around.

You get a sense of the dissolution of family with his son, but not nearly as potent considering the stiff upper lip of repression making it less about resentment than stodginess. The same can be said about the bureaucratic satire of the whole thanks to an almost complete erasure of Williams’ boss Sir James (Michael Cochrane) as a vain contrast to his newfound modesty. Circumstances are less important here. They exist as scaffolding rather than integral context.

While that perhaps makes the whole less weighty in its drama, these decisions do allow Nighy to be the central driving force above plot (an Oscar nomination should be forthcoming). That’s not a slight on Takashi Shimura at all, but an acknowledgement that this film relies on the subtleties of performance more because of how much was stripped away in the adaptation process.

Living is about Williams learning the lessons shared rather than the lessons themselves. The same can be said about Jamie Ramsay’s gorgeous cinematography being more about aesthetics in composition than narrative and metaphoric representation. That’s what seventy years and a different cultural backdrop provide: an excuse to honor an artwork’s legacy while also making it your own. Hermanus and company succeed.

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Bill Nighy as Williams in LIVING. Photo credit: Ross Ferguson. Courtesy of Number 9 films / Sony Pictures Classics.