Living - a masterpiece of poignancy and understatement starring Bill Nighy

Bill Nighy offers the performance of his career in this masterpiece of poignancy and understatement. Nighy is an actor who so often riffs on his vast and distinctive array of Nighy mannerisms that so often it is only the mannerisms that you see, but there is none of that here. Instead he offers a performance of pared-back perfection. You simply can’t imagine that that this won’t be in the Oscars reckoning sometime after Christmas.

Nighy’s task is to play Williams, a veteran civil servant in early-1950s London who suddenly learns that he has at best nine months to live. First, though, the film establishes the world in which he exists. It’s certainly not “living” yet. Barely communicating with his children or his colleagues, Williams is a besuited bowler-hatted on-the-same-train-every-day pen-pusher presiding over a mini-department whose sole purpose is not to get things done. The limit of their ambition is to push cases – whatever their real-life import – under the carpet or “upstairs”. Or even worse, they simply file them in the in-trays which it is in no one’s interest ever to tackle. The department is the precise definition of stasis. “No harm” Williams mutters as he loses yet another file on his own desk. Soulless, joyless, going nowhere, probably not even bothering to tick off the days, Williams reflects and embodies his department. He is lifeless and seemingly unthinking, sleep-walking through his existence… until he gets the ghastly diagnosis. The irony, of course, is that it is the imminence of death which actually gives him life.

Oddly though, the trailer, which focused on Williams’ uncharacteristically spontaneous trip out to lunch at Fortnum’s with a young woman from the office, is slightly misleading. It suggests that he is going to meet his maker after living it up a little. Far better to take our cue for the film from the film’s title. It’s not Living It Up. It’s simply Living. Williams is determined to go out on his own terms. Yes, he is wholly transformed, but the transformation remains wholly within character as he senses what the right thing to do is – to push through the construction of a much-needed children’s playground which his department, along with every other department, has been shamelessly losing in the long grass.

Aimee Lou Wood is excellent as the office worker he (unromantically) latches on to as he ponders his new fragility, but really this is Nighy’s film, and it is a wonderful performance he gives, almost whispered throughout, his restraint never threatened but somehow his new sense of priorities coming through. Screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus work exquisitely together in this awfully British remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1953 film Ikiru, or To Live; and there is a wealth of period detail, from the greyness of the office, to the bomb sites and the tea rooms. And to their credit, they actually give us surprises. There is a point in the film where, quite disorientatingly, it suddenly leaps forward – only to leap back again. It slightly knocks you off your perch, but trust in the film and you start to see exactly why they have done it. By not ending where you might have expected it was going to, the film offers by far the more haunting conclusion – another instance of the precise and perfect judgement which runs throughout.