In a few days – on March 12 – it will be known who will win the “Oscar” for the main male role. One of the favorites is Bill Nye from Living.
When historians look back on the pandemic years—the time of COVID-19—they will be struck by how those many months of anxiety and social distancing caused countless people to ask important existential questions: Am I doing the work I really want? Have I lived the way I really wanted? Or have I just been coasting along as my life goes by?
These questions are at the heart of Oliver Hermanus’ To Live?, an elegantly sentimental British drama adapted by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro from Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1952 film Ikiru, which means “to live” on Japanese. Starring the great Bill Nye, it tells the story of a conservative bureaucrat in 1950s London who is forced to analyze how he has spent the last 30 years of his life.
Nye plays Mr. Williams, a widower in charge of a local government department that approves public projects such as children’s parks, a Kafka-like closed system in which nothing happens. Stuck in the monotony of everyday life, wearing suits and bomber jackets, the almost speechless Mr. Williams sleepwalks through life until one day his doctor gives him a death sentence. It awakens him from his lethargy and sends him searching for the meaning of his existence.
At a seaside resort, he meets a local writer – this is Tom Burke, famous for his work Strike, who takes him for a walk. But the main character does not need it.
Then he becomes obsessed with his only employee, played by the vivacious Amy Lou Wood, whose appeal comes not from her sexuality but from her easygoing, cheerful nature, which is a counterpoint to his calmness. She has come up with a nickname for Mr. Williams – “Mr. Zombie,” a moniker that he sort of accepts, figuring it’s fair.
Her vitality inspires him to live out his remaining days doing good deeds. Everyone in the movie theater can predict whether or not he’ll make it—we’ve seen this story before when Ikiru sets the template—but his fate is poignant nonetheless.
There’s a lot of talent you might see on To Live. From the creators of Mr. Williams’ costumes, to the authors of the exquisite decor and font in the captions.
1950s London has been lovingly recreated in a way that will make quite a few British viewers purr with delight. And who wouldn’t love Bill Nye’s performance?
Although many critics would point out that it’s better when it’s funnier. His performance is quiet, deeply visceral and very graceful – as if someone unwraps a mummy and it comes to life.
But given all that, why do film critics find the film disappointing? Not only because it is a remake, but traditionally every critic is a supporter of originality. However, let’s not forget that the film “Ikiru” was also inspired by Tolstoy’s great novel from 1886 “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”.
But when Kurosawa did his version, he didn’t tell exactly the same story as Tolstoy and somehow mechanically move it from 1880s St. Petersburg to 1880s Tokyo. He reimagined the plot and set the action in the time he lives in – 1950s Tokyo, still ravaged by World War II. Although it tells a universal story about finding meaning in the face of death, Kurosawa’s film is imbued with the urgency of its historical moment, which in Japan’s reconstruction era desperately needed to believe that even the most ordinary person—a clerk, had the ability to perform heroism and display nobility.
Alas, Ishiguro’s adaptation lacks inventiveness and tension. It feels more like a cleverly edited transposition than the artistic reimagining one would expect from a Nobel Prize winner whose imagination is admired by many. Instead of redirecting our attention to the present, the film delves into Britain’s boundless obsession with its past.
Looking at period detail, the British capital in To Live is a far cry from the textures of today’s fast-paced, Brexit-battered, multicultural London, where the Mr Williams of 2022 might be of East Asian or Caribbean descent. The chaos of life never intervenes. As with too many British dramas, the action takes place in a safely stylized England, a museum diorama where not even life and death can touch us. Understated and muted, Hermanus’ direction fails to capture the despair and sadness that gave Kurosawa’s original film its emotional power, especially in its transcendent finale played out in the snow—one of the most beautiful and moving climaxes in cinema history.
Instead of shaking us to our core like “Ikiru”, “To Live” teaches us a life lesson we can all agree with. It’s like a special life lesson for adults – a very good one, for which Nye deservedly deserves an Oscar.
