Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp) nervously boards the train for his first day of work under Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy), the no-nonsense head of the London Public Works department in the 1950s.  When a group of local women visit the office again to inquire about the construction of a neighborhood playground, Peter is put to work ushering them through the layers of monotonous – and ultimately fruitless – bureaucracy which guides the development of the city.  The department is disrupted, however, after Williams receives a fatal diagnosis from his doctor with only months left to live, the man who thrived on order and process is desperately seeking something to give his life meaning before it is too late. 

Living is Oliver Hermanus‘ adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), itself an adaptation of the 1886 Leo Tolstoy novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, released by Lionsgate.  Working from a script penned by Kazuo Ishiguro, the stalely-yet-muted film synthesizes and concentrates on men’s fears surrounding their permeance in a finite life even more so than the classic Toho Company drama, coming in at a leaner 102-minutes, down from 142, yet in doing so it loses some of the necessary material yet still somehow feels like the longer work.  Playing itself a little too close to Kurosawa’s work, possibly out of respect for the auteur, it never can quite stand on its own so that audiences unfamiliar with the original may glean more from the London transplant, but it is hard to justify the necessity of Living that truly is just a relocation of the original. Hermanus and Ishiguro do not even seem interested in updating the story to modern times, and while keeping it entrenched in the 50s, it goes to show that maybe the only permeant thing across the generations is the fear of being forgotten after a life without purpose, it still feels lacking in its purpose. 

While the film opens with Wakeling, the young and bright-eyed bureaucrat who is determined to make a difference, after the first act that introduces us to the many cogs and wheels that haplessly spin behind the scenes of London, Living shifts control of the narrative to Nighy’s Williams character for much of the duration.  We follow the man, depressed from his troubling diagnosis taking some unprecedented time off of work to go on a bar crawl, form a close and blossoming friendship with Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) who has recently left the department, and then teetering on the fence about how to repair his strained relationship with his son, Michael (Barney Fishwick).   

These events play out episodically across the middle of the film, almost aimlessly, as Williams passes through these scenes like a less-affected Ebenezer Scrooge on his own less-structured odyssey through past, present, and future.  Nighy’s performance is incredibly reserved throughout, until the final of these interactions with Margaret at a pub where she reveals to him his nickname, Mr. Zombie, around the office.  Without even the slightest flash of fleeting anger at the unofficial title, Williams is resolved to make a difference, and upon his triumphant return to the office, he leads his team of public servants through the rain to the proposed site of the playground and sees to it personally that the petitions are filed and processed back at the offices. 

The third act, as with Ikiru, culminates in a remembered eulogy of the cantankerous curmudgeon, his colleagues sharing and reminiscing about all the small day-to-day changes in his demeanor in the days leading up to his passing.  Also like its predecessor, it is the strongest sequence of the film; a sweeping and emotional montage scored by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch and edited by Chris Wyatt.  It is technically well done, but the sequence highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the story in holding all of the development until the end for Williams.  With Living, as stated, being so genetically close to Ikiru, a restructure would have greatly helped Hermanus’ work find a purpose of its own, giving a different kind of depth to the story and breaking it free from its “on the rails” delivery. It is almost ironic that a film critiquing the flowchart has its biggest narrative flaw being that it follows too closely to a chart of its own; A and then B and then C until the end, afraid to break the template and show us something startlingly real. There is no denying the emotion and the sentiment is genuine, but the delivery is far too uniform to leave an impact.   

On its own, Living is a handsomely made film, not so entrenched in the inner working of British offices that it is inaccessible from a plot standpoint, but it is not a welcoming film despite its unassuming design.  Nighy’s heartbreaking performance consumes everything bringing about feelings of deep despair in audiences, and while the plot reflects an all-too-accurate representation of life and the fears that there is nothing to show for it at the time of death, Living ends on a note that is somehow both overwhelmingly depressing and sickeningly saccharine. This confusion of tone leads to an unfortunately hollow and empty feeling at the close.  The film ultimately feels like the small talk at a funeral and brings about those same abrasive and uncomfortable feelings in audiences which, across its runtime, eventually undermines the message that life is beautiful if only we have the courage to make it so.