At some point in the development of one of his most revered classics, director Akira Kurosawa chose to change the title from "The Life of Kanji Watanabe" - an inverted homage to one of the project's inspirations, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich - to the simpler, bolder "Ikiru," meaning "To Live." One of his screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto, considered it pretentious, though Japanese audiences apparently disagreed enough to make the film a minor financial hit, in advance of Ikiru going on to persistent international acclaim as a highlight of Kurosawa's lengthening, prestigious resume.
I suppose Hashimoto may have had a point. "To Live" is rather much, even if it fits the Capra-esque, sentimental naturalism of the film. At any rate, "Ikiru" packs a further phonetic punch for film lovers who don't speak Japanese. (English-speakers especially are suckers for three-syllable Asian words and names: harakiri, samurai, Akira, Naruto...)
But, then, say a South African filmmaker in the third decade of a new millennium directs an official English-language remake of Ikiru, and calls it something more familiar in its idiomatic naïveté and pretension, such as "Living."
Just saying, maybe Hashimoto had a point.
There is now an official English-language remake of Ikiru - bearing a stamp of approval from Kurosawa Production Co., no less - and it is called Living. Written by the esteemed Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, and directed by the aforementioned South African Oliver Hermanus, it proves to be both decent on its own terms, and decently faithful as an adaptation of the original film, though transposing the setting from early-'50s Japan to early-'50s England. In the process of making that principal adaptation, it reveals that the original film's themes of post-war malaise, emotional repression, and bureaucratic indifference are appropriately transmissible. Both films chronicle the final days of an old public servant who learns that he is terminally ill, and thus seeks out the secret of a fulfilling life in desperate anticipation of his appointed hour. The new film stars the venerable Bill Nighy as our protagonist, Mr. Williams, and balances out his impressive and seemingly effortless dramatic presence with a well-cast roster of fine performers, including Tom Burke as a starving writer who takes Williams on a tour of the hedonic London night life; the effusively charming Aimee Lou Wood as a beautiful young woman in whom Williams finds an unlikely, platonic companion; Barney Fishwick as his estranged and passive son; and Alex Sharp as Williams' fresh-faced new employee in the Public Works department of the city council.
There are a lot of different avenues through which I could describe the "wanting" of Living when contrasted with Ikiru, even as both films tell functionally the same story. For one, the substantially more brisk pacing of Hermanus and Ishiguro's film, with a running time about 40 minutes less than that of the Kurosawa original, does it few dramatic favors. We can thank our lucky stars that neither Ishiguro or Hermanus would be so gauche as to trim off the ending of Ikiru, which in the original functions almost as its own one-act play, changing from the preceding feature's rhapsodic, romantic qualities to something more dry and satirically acerbic. And yet, while the filmmakers have preserved the ending and its ambivalent implications, the structure of their drama overall feels too abridged. Part of the beauty of Kurosawa's film is how its perspective is at once so observant of the most subtle emotional details of his actors' performances, while at the same time remaining so patiently observational and apart from the drama. This apartness, and the time to really sit in uncomfortable stretches with the characters, allows the film's own perspective to generate a tremendous emotional weight, as we become more and more aware of the sense of helplessness and alienation underscoring the drama. Hermanus is simply too aesthetically cliche and superficial in his approach with Living. When Sutherland (Burke's character) takes Williams' out on the town, he tries to visualize inebriation and depression through a more stylized kind of montage that remains too preoccupied with just the moping faces of his actors, and doesn't get the most out of setting or the more situational ways in which Kurosawa's original film established a mood. Hermanus and Ishiguro's end to Living is, similarly, now rendered just a stylishly-structured climax, paling in comparison to the suffocating, drawn-out coda of Ikiru.
There's also a lot to quibble with here as far as the foundations of how Hermanus and Ishiguro "translate," if not the entirety of Ikiru, then at least certain themes, and the debatable extent to which some of these themes are essential or non-essential. Though a contemporary drama, the timeliness of Ikiru matters just as much as its sense of timelessness. Its setting in the early-'50s provides a window into and commentary upon a society in post-war flux, at once rocking from urbanization and rocking-and-rolling to a new jazz age. Takashi Shimura's forlorn crooning of the 40-year-old romantic ballad "Gondola no Uta" is made all the more tear-jerking because Kurosawa effectively contextualizes it within a musical tableau that also includes drunken young flappers leaning on Shimura's shoulders in the back of a taxi, attempting a garbled rendition of the Ross Bagdasarian-penned pop hit "Come On-a My House." The complimentary usage of "The Rowan Tree" in Living, unfortunately, lacks a similarly trenchant contrast, underserving Nighy's brilliant, tortured rendition more than anything else. A similar lacking is pointed up by Ishiguro and Hermanus's insubstantial attempts to flesh out the relationship between Williams and his son through a flashback sequence that copies the structure of a complementary scene in Ikiru, but fails to replicate the same degree of imaginative detail.
One gets a real sense of a time and place from Ikiru, whereas with Living, one has to ask the question of whether or not Hermanus and Ishiguro are really interested in exploring the setting, the sights, and the sounds of post-war London, or if they just feel that the characteristic of a certain sense of post-war Britishism fits the template set by the, as it turns out, much less pretentious Kurosawa. One might as well go further and ask if Hermanus and Ishiguro's efforts might not have been better suited to trying to make their film contemporary as well, setting it in the present day. But, then again, maybe that's the rub betraying all of the shortcomings of Living: Alternately treacly and vulgar movies about old codgers trying to get their groove back have virtually become their own genre, and it's probably not just the narrative template, but the very signifiers of artistic authenticity that come from Kurosawa's film, that are over-deterministically informing the filmmakers' sense of distinguishing their own film as a more nuanced kind of dramatic parable. There are possibly a lot of aspects of Living that could have been done better if the filmmakers had challenged themselves to make a story that was as contemporary to them as Ikiru was to its own time, but that would also risk making it all the more apparently similar and formulaic with regards to a slew of other serviceable, mediocre movies. It may be a case of the remaking of Ikiru serving an ambition to break from generic conventions, with the resulting film being rather awkward in its attempt to live up to such an ambition.
None of this is to say that Living is lacking in all dramatic effectiveness, and it's not simply a matter of chalking things up to a series of quite good performances. No small credit is due to Ishiguro's script, which doesn't slouch in the sense that it rarely just copies-and-pastes scenarios and exchanges from the original film. An especially touching scene between Wood and Fischwick near the end sufficiently stands the test of comparison with any scene from its predecessor, deftly playing with dramatic irony that works from the perspective of both characters. And though it doesn't hold up much when compared to Kurosawa and cinematographer Asakazu Nakai's masterful composition, Hermanus and Jamie Ramsay's own visual work here is not below its own panache and occasional poetic substance. There's more than enough material here to support Living as its own well-written, character-driven drama. As with most remakes, its flaws are largely those most apt to be heightened by comparison, which is at once uncharitable as a framework for appraising the film and its merits, while also unavoidably endemic to the pretense of remaking Ikiru at all.
There's a certain strand of argument among cinephiles that goes like this: Why bother remaking the masterpieces? Even if it's good, it will only ever stand in the shadow of a greatness that it can never hope to replicate, not merely because of the subjective quality of its predecessor, but precisely because what made its predecessor great is so dependent upon the confluence of original imagination and unique talent in a specific time and place, which renders it something besides "a good movie." What's worse, the inferior version risks deflecting curiosity from, rather than promoting interest in, the superior work. Better to keep remakes to those bad and mediocre stories that could stand to be done better.
I've never been particularly amenable to this frame of mind, and not just because I think there are actually quite a few good remakes. Indeed, the further back you go in film history, there are often remakes that are objectively superior to the good and great films that they re-adapt, or at least turn out just as good. Perhaps the problem is even that the culture of cinema does not promote the conscious "remaking" or "re-staging" of canon classics enough, whereas the theater as both a medium and culture seems to have a much healthier relationship with the idea of taking a very good script and just doing it a different way. With movies, our crisis might be precisely that too much of our mediocrity can simply hide behind the veil of legal distinction from all the stuff that it rips off so cynically, whereas it might be better to encourage none too few of the nouvel auteur writer-director hacks to test the originality and artistic worth of their propositions on the basis of its giving a bold new perspective to an inerrant masterpiece.
Though I certainly don't like Living nearly as much as I like Ikiru, and though I don't think Ishiguro and Hermanus's new film is nearly as narratively or aesthetically engaging as Kurosawa's, I do nonetheless envy those who have not seen Ikiru, or perhaps have never even heard of it, and will chance upon Living and be able to appreciate its satisfactory qualities without conceding them to the achievements of its predecessor. The film that Ishiguro and Hermanus have accomplished is both daring in its concept and tactful in its execution. And if I were to come to the conclusion that it's still no more than a faint ember compared to the crackling fire of Kurosawa's masterpiece, that would still be precisely the point. There is more than enough time to hash out the dialogue between Living and Ikiru, to probe their respective interpretation of characters and themes, to compare and contrast Hermanus and Kurosawa's formal approaches, and to judge their unique or derivative qualities in the sense of their generic and stylistic contexts. But the immediate task should really go to those who, even if they feel a little shame or unease over "not getting around to it yet," have not seen Ikiru, and are therefore prepared to acknowledge the crediting of Kurosawa's film in the opening titles of Living, and then not have their attentions divided between what they are seeing and the memory of another movie, its effects, personal resonance, and longer reputation.
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