Living
Directed by Oliver Hermanus
Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa
Starring Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Tom Burke, and Alex Sharp
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

The first “Why?” with any remake is usually, “Why are they remaking this movie now?” assuming it’s not “Why are they remaking this at all?” Remakes are touchy business. When they’re not blatant cash grabs from a study too lazy and scared to produce something original, they’re often doomed the never live up to the original. Need a tentpole for the holiday season? Let’s roll out West Side Story again and get *throws dart at board with names of directors* Steven Spielberg to do it. Some movies keep getting remade over and over again (A Star is Born). Some movies desperately need a remake and don’t get one (Logan’s Run is one I've been dying to see improved upon). Some remakes you think are going to be unnecessary end up extrapolating on the original in such a unique and interesting way they surpass it (the recent Planet of the Apes movies, non-Tim Burton category). And then there is the class of remakes where international sensations get retooled for Hollywood. This is, I think, the best kind of remake, or at least the one that works most of the time. Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs became Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award winner The Departed. Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo got a moodier Americanization when David Fincher got his hands on it. Michael Haneke famously made a shot-for-shot remake of his own German language film Funny Games and in the process created a meta-narrative about the nature of remakes.

A big reason why this particular kind of remake works so well is that half the time the American audience doesn’t even know they’re watching a remake. I didn’t even know that last year’s Best Picture winner Coda was a remake of a French film (2014’s Le Famille Bélier) until after I touted it as my favorite movie of 2021. Sometimes it’s not even that important a piece of information, like whether or not a movie is based on a book or if it’s an original screenplay. But sometimes a filmmaker decides they’re going to remake a classic and then it definitely matters. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man. Scott Derrickson’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. Do these films spark joy? Or do they make you think, “Why would you ever try to remake a movie that is already perfect?” Which is precisely the question I asked when I found out an English language remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru was in the works.

Though overshadowed by the towering legacy of films like Seven Samurai (remade as The Magnificent Seven, which was itself remade), Yojimbo (remade as Django in Italy and Last Man Standing in the USA), and Rashomon (they’ll come for you too someday, sweet prince), Ikiru is Kurosawa’s quietest masterpiece. The story centers on a lifelong government bureaucrat Watanabe who finds out he has six months to live and realizes that he has no idea how to actually live. Watanabe is played beautifully by Kurosawa regular Takeshi Shimura (he’s in all three of those movies above) and his nuanced performance highlights the absolute tragedy at the film’s heart. Watanabe’s transformation from dead-eyed bureaucrat to advocate (his last act is to push through a playground neighborhood parents have been lobbying for that he had been content to punt to other departments) is unforgettable.

Despite being the sort of film firmly on my Remake No Fly List seeing the “Screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro” credit quickly turned my “WHY?!” into “I’m listening.” They don’t just give the Nobel Prize for Literature to anyone, and his novels are as excellent as they are diverse. From the buttoned-up Butler’s tale Remains of the Day (which has a lot of Ikiru in it and makes Ishiguro a natural fit for this script) to the dystopian sci-fi of Never Let You Go, Ishiguro’s books are some of the best the English language has to offer. The casting of British character actor Bill Nighy was another step in the right direction. Nighy is always a welcome sight as a secondary character in any number of movies (Love Actually, Shaun of the Dead, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) so seeing him treated as a leading man is a thrill. South African director Oliver Hermanus is an unknown quantity, but if two of the three most important elements of a film are rock solid, how bad can it be?

Not bad at all, in fact! In addition to making a film that would not make Kurosawa roll over in his grave, Hermanus has delivered a confident English-language adaptation of Ikiru that makes a case for itself. Though still relatively non-essential as far as remakes go, the film’s timeless message about not becoming a corporate drone plays just as well in 2022 as it did in 1952. The buttoned-up primness of post-war Britain syncs up with the rise of the salaryman in post-war Japan as well. Kudos to the filmmakers for not feeling the need to update the setting with this remake, as this story plays best inside of a repressed society. One where men are meant to work and work and work until one day they look up and they’re old and dying and it’s all gone. That still happens today, of course, but from a storytelling standpoint this one greatly benefits from being set within a world of bowler hats and train commuters.

Nighy is, shocker, sublime here, and I’d dare to say just as good as Shimura in Kurosawa’s original. This role in particular—Watanabe becomes Williams in Living—requires so many of the little acting intangibles that you only pickup from years in the business. You can’t put a showy DeNiro type in a role like this. You need someone who can tell the story with the slightest movements and silences and watching Nighy at work is this film’s biggest selling point. The thing is beautiful to look at and beautifully written, but Nighy’s work is so delicate you feel like it’s seconds away from crumbling. Inhabiting a character who is essentially a human zombie is yeoman’s work because it is so easy to overdo it.

An adaptation of an international classic of this magnitude is such a tall order, I would have praised director Oliver Hermanus if he had simply managed to not throw up on his cleats. That this feels like one of the year’s best films is shocking, even with the pedigree of the screenwriter and star. This could have been fine, and instead it was fantastic. I’m not saying there needs to be a rush to re-adapt Breathless or The Bicycle Thief but knowing that there are folks out there capable of turning in a remake that earns its keep is heartening in an era of soulless cash grabs.