Bill Nighy actually is great within the deeply melancholic Living
“Maybe he’s just decided he’s had enough”
Living could also be an adaptation of the 1952 Akira Kurosawa movie Ikiru however each take their inspiration from Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which makes plenty of sense when you’ve seen it (I’ll maintain my fingers up now and say I ain’t seen Ikiru…). It’s a movie that kinda flew beneath the radar a bit, although its star Bill Nighy garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role and that’s an actual disgrace.
For Kazuo Oshiguro’s adaptation, directed right here by Oliver Hermanus, is imbued with a stunning, mild melancholy that hits excellent. Set in 1953 London, Nighy performs Rodney Williams, the greyest of gray bureaucrat within the Public Works division of the London County Council, taking perverse pleasure in tying up functions of their labyrinthine system. A terminal prognosis of abdomen most cancers upends his perspective fully although, surprisingly sufficient giving him a brand new lease of life on what’s left.
Nighy is ideal casting and while a post-war swimsuit may appear to be the type of function he’s portrayed a thousand occasions earlier than, the deep unhappiness that haunts him right here finds him enjoying on a wholly totally different register. As his buttoned-up sternness begins to soften and his behaviour shifting in methods he’d by no means beforehand contemplated, an odd type of knowledge involves the fore, a centring of the emotional self fully new to him and a belated sharing of goodness to a few of these round him.
From former colleague Miss Harris (a beautiful Aimee Lou Wood) which whom he strikes up a doubtlessly scandalous friendship to the redoubtable Mrs Smith (the ever-excellent Lia Williams), the chief of a gaggle of girls whose utility to show a bombsite right into a playground has lengthy been ignored, his affect belatedly ripples out in a heat glow of humanity. As we’re left questioning, what a disgrace it took impending demise to remind him (and us) of life’s potentialities.