Photo © Sony Pictures
Bill Nighy in 'Living'
Bill Nighy in 'Living'
In Living, Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) trudges to work five days a week in 1950s London. He’s a sepulchral figure, stiff as a colonel on the parade ground, and speaks in a graveyard murmur as he presides over a department at the London County Council. He’s a rusty cog in a bureaucratic wheel that will barely turn.
The jolly young woman in the office, Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), advises the newcomer, Wakeling (Alex Sharp), to maintain the “skyscraper” of paperwork towering at the edge of his desk. It’s not good form to look too eager to complete the job at hand. She nicknames one of their coworkers “Mr. Hover” because his pen forever hovers over documents without touching the pages.
Her name for Mr. Williams is “Mr. Zombie.” And when the opportunity arises for her to tell him of this moniker, he barely blinks. “Mr. Zombie, my, my,” he says, recognizing the truth in her observation. “It’s quite appropriate.”
Living comes to the screen with a high pedigree. The screenplay by the Japanese-British author of Remains of the Day is a Nobel Prize winner, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro. He adapted it from 1952’s Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa, Japan’s acclaimed postwar director, who adapted it in turn from Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Cineastes who enjoyed Remains of the Day’s 1993 film version will recognize Mr. Williams’s similarity to the butler played by Anthony Hopkins. In both characters, the public emotional reserve that characterized British society has turned crippling. However, Mr. Williams makes Hopkins’ Mr. Stevens appear extroverted by contrast.
Living gives only few clues about Mr. Williams’ life. His wife is dead and perhaps the wartime stoicism demanded of the British people had chilled his spirit; the empire survived but was crumbling day by day, leaving him as a kind of third mate on a ship that had run aground. He lives with his son and daughter-in-law who find the “old man” irritating; his emotional ties to them are truncated; he can’t express his feelings. And when the doctor tells him that cancer will kill him in six to eight months, he keeps his tears to himself.
South African director Oliver Hermanus supervised Living’s beautiful cinematography, especially the dim interiors of Mr. Williams’ labyrinthine office and charmless home and the nightlife at a seaside resort where he tries but fails to drink away the news of his impending demise.
Margaret becomes the unlikely ray of light to penetrate his gloom. This is not a Hollywood movie, so, no, it’s not sexual or a winter-spring romance in any conventional sense. But Margaret and Mr. Williams have lunch, they sit in a pub, they walk together, and her infectious joy in the everyday moments of living sets him on an eleventh-hour path to redeem the meaningless his life had fallen into.
Living is screening at the Downer Theater.
