Let’s face it, you put a target on your back when trying to remake one of Akira Kurosawa’s classics. Many have tried, few have come close to matching the Japanese auteur. Oliver Hermanus has taken on the challenge with Living, a redo of Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru. A daunting task, for sure, but Hermanus has one thing in his favor: Bill Nighy.
Is there anyone who doesn’t like Bill Nighy? And has he ever been bad at anything? In Living, he plays a monotonous civil servant in 1950s London, a man whose life has come to not have much meaning to it. But a terminal medical diagnosis changes everything, and suddenly he must take stock of his life and try to find the fulfillment he has long denied himself.
The film is penned by Kazuo Ishiguro, acclaimed writer of The White Countess, The Saddest Music in the World, and author of Never Let Me Go. Hermanus is best known for directing Shirley Adams, Beauty, and The Endless River.
Joining Nighy in the cast are Alex Sharp, Aimee Lou Wood, and Tom Burke.
Our writer Cortland Jacoby had a chance to catch Living at Sundance, and while she was lukewarm to it, she appreciated the contemplative lead performance by Nighy.
Sony Pictures Classics will release Living in theaters on December 23rd.
LIVING is the story of an ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, who at the eleventh hour makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful – into one he can say has been lived to the full.