Living Review
Low stakes and small scale, but a rewarding film filled with heart, pathos and emotion.
Williams (Bill Nighy) is a humorless civil servant in 1950s London. When he receives a troubling and grim diagnosis, however, he decides to take time off work to experience life. Not wanting to trouble his son and daughter in law, who are too obsessed anyhow with how to make money off him, he heads out to the beach for a debaucherous time with author Sutherland (Tom Burke), but soon realises that life isn’t for him. Back in the city, he increasingly gravitates towards the young vibrancy of Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), until in a lightbulb moment he works out how he can secure his legacy, leave an impact, and live a life in the time he has left.
Oliver Hermanus directs this gorgeous period piece, written by Kazuo Ishiguro and based on a film by Akiro Kurosawa, which was in turn based on the 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. That interesting, unusual combination of a Russian inspiration, through a Japanese lens, painted on a British canvas, gives rise to something that - while undoubtedly a slow paced, small scale, introspective work - also feels fresh and consistently engaging.
The film has a deeply dreamlike, hazy hue to it. From a cinematography perspective, there is much to enjoy and dissect. The highlights are intense, shining brightly off sunlit skin in the dark bowels of the government machinations. The shadows, too, are intense. When Williams and Sutherland are frolicking in the seaside circus, the lights are soft, hazy. Director of Photography Jamie Ramsay also grounds his subjects, with copious room above the tops of their heads dominating the screen, when compared with more traditional visual fare.
The real star of the show, though, is of course Bill Nighy. Nighy gives a career best performance as the thin, reedy Williams, freshly brought to life. Right from the off you can tell you are watching a quietly powerhouse performance, but it's as the character grows and changes that Nighy is able to really bring to bear his prodigious talents. This isn’t an over the top or showy performance, but it is a quietly brilliant one.
The other thing that must be remarked upon is the structure of the piece. With some slight non-linear elements, but more pointedly a general willingness to jump ahead in time and let the audience figure it out, the film is given a new lease on life.
Living is only 102 minutes long, which is quite short - particularly amongst this years dearth of 2 or 3 hour movies. But boy, does it pack a lot of life into that runtime.
