Living

Based on the storyline of a 1952 Kurosawa film, the setting has been transposed to London, in the drab postwar days of 1953.  Widower Mr Williams (Bill Nighy) works in County Hall, head of a small department.  He leads an utterly predictable, buttoned up and closed in existence, his work the primary focus of his life.  His staff are not his friends, but respect his consistency and dedication.  All this we learn in the opening couple of minutes from a couple of simple scenes.

Williams surprises his colleagues by leaving early one day, without giving reason. He is off to his doctor, who confirms the news he'd most feared - the cancer inside him leaves him only a few more months of life.  But what sort of life?

The colleagues are even more surprised when their boss doesn't show up the next day.  Or the next.  But Mr Williams is thinking about living, and what that means to him.

He tries the traditional approach to havingfun, of the 'wine, women and song' variety, aided by a louche playwright (Tom Burke) he meets in a seaside cafe.  But if that's not the answer then what is?  Finding the solution takes time, and he works it out from the unexpected source of Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), the most junior member of his team, now working in a cafe.  Which in turn takes him back to work, a man on a mission...

From the off we know what the eventual outcome for our central character will be, but not what he can do before that ending comes.  It could so easily become a maudlin tale, slow and sad and predictable (and some people might see it that way).  But a superb script from Kazuro Ishiguro, and Nighy's portrayal of a man determined to dig deep to find who he really is, make for something totally uplifting.  There's constant humour from the inability of the characters to communicate, and the scene at the dinner table where Williams wants to tell son Michael one thing, Michael wants to say another, and his wife wants someone to say something, is a masterpiece of the comedy of awkwardness.  Sparely shot and cleverly structured, with a careful eye for human detail and the grotesqueries of paper shuffling in '50s local government, it's a world in which the small things dominate, where the red tape seems impenetrable and real people count for little.  Out of such unpromising beginnings Williams offers the hopefulness of the human spirit.

Living may well go down as Nighy's finest ever film performance.  He certainly moved this viewer.  Wonderful.