Living: An Interesting Meditation on Life

Movies that are made outside English speaking countries tend to have a hard time reaching audiences in America. Occasionally something will break through to the mainstream like Parasite or a show like Squid Game and will find an audience, however more often than not a story will not reach the mainstream until it is adapted for English speakers with a cast that speaks English. There are some arguments for this, like the fact that videos or television are a visual medium so needing to read while watching the media takes away from the experience and sometimes dubbed voices miss idiomatic expressions and tone which can detract from subtext. Living is one of these adaptations for western audiences, providing an update to Kurosawa’s Ikiru with an interesting final result.

Living follows Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) a dedicated civil servant that receives a dire medical diagnosis and has to come to terms with the fact that his life has passed him by in a way. He tries to fill his final days with the fun that he missed out up until this point and reacquaints with a coworker named Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood of Sex Education) who still has that zest for life.

Much like The Whale late last year, Living is by and large a character study that is carried by a strong performance from Nighy. He is great in the role and how well the movie works for a viewer is going to be defined by how well they buy into his character. He carries a gravitas to his character where he knows his fate but at the same time is trying to keep up his façade while dealing with all the personal issues that come with learning about his own impending death.

The movie does kind of fall apart when the third act resolution comes along and it is not really set up by what happens before it in any meaningful way. Mr. Williams early in the movie does his job in the best interest of the Department of Public Works but by the end, as his time is winding down, he almost becomes Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation with his need to get this playground made. There is not really anything that the viewer sees (besides Margaret saying she called him “Mr. Zombie” behind his back) that indicates that he realizes he was not acting properly in the past and that he should change.

There are also questionable choices when it comes to the execution of the third act and a slight plot detour that really only adds about seven minutes to the runtime that it could have done without. This is compounded by the fact that the conversation at the end of the movie between Mr. Williams’ son and Margaret contradicts the plot tangent and just kind of raises more questions than it answers. The movie also has a few more endings than it needs and could have done a lot to improve the third act by cutting out one or two sequences about people trying to grapple with his death.

At the end of the day, Living is a collection of moments and emotions more than it is a cohesive narrative, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It is worth watching, especially since Nighy was nominated for Best Actor and the movie received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. It is not available on streaming right now, however how the movie is portrayed does lend itself to that viewing experience.

Final Rating: 8.5/10