Living                     4 ½ stars

A long time ago a masterpiece of a film called Ikiru was created by Akira Kurosawa about a Japanese bureaucrat in the 1950’s who has found out that he is dying of cancer. I never saw that groundbreaking film but feel that much of its feeling has been recaptured in the British remake Living. Bill Nighy (of Love Actually) stars as Mr. Williams, the London bureaucrat in the Public Works department in Oliver Hermanus’s film. The opening sequence looks so much like an early 50’s film you at first wonder if it is a long lost treasure from that era. The first scenes move slowly and feature very stilted conversations among the bureaucrats that convey how repressed British society is at this time and Bill Nighy is the perfect actor to portray a man hiding his emotions. When the cancer diagnosis is made we can hardly tell what effect it has on him. We follow him as he explores various avenues of spending his final months like going out on the town to strip clubs and having lunch with a young woman he used to work with. Ultimately, he decides to make a difference by doing some good for the community, seeing a project to construct a playground to completion, all the while keeping his condition a secret. The slow pace of this film may turn some viewers off, but the challenge the filmmakers took on pays off mainly due to the talents of Nighy in what is probably one of the best roles of his thirty plus year career. I don’t know if he will receive an Oscar for the performance but he certainly deserves his Best Actor nomination.