Living: Bill Nighy's Quiet Tour de Force About a Career Office Drone's Last-Chance Epiphany
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
Once you’ve blown your nose and dried your eyes – because, y’know, allergies – at the end of Oliver Hermanus’s Living, thoughts turn to how alike the most unalike countries can be.
Set among the bureaucratic class in post-War London, with a protagonist (Bill Nighy) whose life is a study in lock-step conformity, the movie is a Western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru, (To Live), about a similarly rigid Tokyo bureaucrat.
In both cases, it’s a story about a society trying to reconstruct itself after the horrors of war, while remaining hidebound in tradition and class consciousness.
Strait-laced Williams (Bill Nighy) begins to tentatively search for meaning in Living.
And in both cases, these lifelong model citizens have their dedication to officiousness shaken by a terminal diagnosis, and experience an epiphany about what genuinely makes life worth living.
The British-Japanese synergy is strengthened by the scripting of Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day trod the same ground with its portrait of a duty-bound English butler.
In a magnificently subtle performance, Nighy plays Williams, a stone-faced public works manager whose “Good mornings” are perfunctory, and whose management style is all about shuffling paper to avoid dealing with issues head on.
We first meet him through the eyes of another, young Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), a rookie in the Public Works office who connects on the train with his office-mates, who give him a quick tutorial in how to conduct himself at all times, complete with instructions on when and how to talk in meetings and how to address his superior Williams.
There is a satirical element to this meeting of conservatively dressed office drones, the uniformity of dress, and the almost military synchronicity of their walk. The helpful “hacks” of office work continue on arrival when the vivacious but efficient Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) informs Wakeling of the importance of keeping an unsteadily tall pile of paper on his desk – indicative of the amount of work one has eagerly taken on.
If there is any life lesson to be learned from his superior, Wakeling doesn’t see it, save for a slavish dedication to repetition and habit. Wakeling is already a bad fit, in that he seeks to actually help three women from the neighbourhood who want a playground built. (In this case, it is people who are shuffled around, office to office, as opposed to paper).
And then comes the diagnosis that shatters Williams’ world. He shares his home but little else with a son and daughter-in-law whose relationship with him is so superficial, he can’t begin to share the bad news.
Instead, Williams does the unthinkable. He stops showing up for work.
In a way, Living is about an alien joining the world of people with real lives, learning or re-learning the most rudimentary things. He finds a kindred spirit in a writer/barfly named Sutherland (Tom Burke), who instinctively prescribes alcohol and takes Williams out for perhaps the first bender of his life. (Shorn of inhibitions, Williams turns to song, singing a ditty that was a favourite of his late wife).
He encounters Ms Harris on the street while still AWOL, and discovers she’s now employed (and exploited) by a posh restaurant, no longer in the grey office atmosphere that was at odds with her nature.
They become close, with everyone including the young woman assuming his intentions to be romantic. But he makes clear he simply wants to be around people with a thirst for life as his days wane..
And in his last redemptive act, he joins Wakeling in the provocative act of bureaucracy-busting, using what’s left of his respectability to push forward the playground project against considerable opposition.
Nighy performs a considerable character arc with only the smallest of emotional reveals, as if tentatively exercising unused muscles of humanity and even joy. Though he’s lived a life of stoic responsibility and crushing sameness, Williams’ epiphany seems both real and not showy.
There is awards season talk for Nighy’s performance, an appreciation of his varied career (Love Actually, Shaun of the Dead, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Underworld) and it would be nice to see this actor’s actor take some bows for Living.
Living. Directed by Oliver Hermanus, written by Kazuo Ishiguro. Stars Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp.Opens January 20 in Toronto (Varsity), Vancouver (Fifth Avenue) and Ottawa (ByTowne).