When I added this to my list, I had no idea that it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I almost never watch remakes but in this instance, there is such a gulf of time and even culture between the two versions that it might be worth exploring. In the event, this is an extremely faithful adaptation of the original. It’s interesting how its Britishness makes it more humorous and entertaining to us than the Japanese original. Yet in the end there’s no real contest. Ikiru possesses layers of depth that are simply absent here, only to be replaced by sentimentality. It’s a nice effort but this is no great film.

In 1953, Peter Wakeling is an eager new employee of the Public Works department of the London County Council. Together with his dour-faced colleagues, he takes the morning train to work and meets the taciturn Rodney Williams who heads the department. He finds that the office is mired in bureaucracy and the staff merely push work from one department to another. One day, Mr. Williams announces that he is taking the afternoon off without explaining why. At the doctor’s office, he is told that his cancer is terminal and he only has months to live. He finds himself unable to tell the news to his son and his daughter-in-law who live with him, as they are preoccupied with their own lives. He starts absenting himself from work, withdraws half of his life savings and considers committing suicide in a seaside resort town. There he meets an insomniac writer who takes him to enjoy the nightlife. Later he runs into Miss Harris, a young employee in his department who is looking to change jobs. He starts spending time with her in order to learn from her how to be happy and full of life once more.

This is a very faithful remake, down to having a playground being the main character’s final project and a song to crystalize his emotions. The one major difference is the addition of a young colleague as a point of view character. This means that we have both Mr. Wakeling and Miss Harris to represent Williams’ long lost youth. While Miss Harris can be said to embody a zest for life and enjoyment of simple pleasures, Mr. Wakeling is meant to be a repudiation of a working life without passion, going through the motions day by day like a zombie. The result is that while Watanabe of Ikiru was a more distant and mysterious character, Williams is an open book, at least to the audience. We’re directly told exactly how he feels at every moment and the result is a more sentimental, less subtle film. I do concede that because it’s more approachable, it’s just plain more fun. The imagery of countless bureaucrats wearing dark suits trooping off to work alone is darkly amusing. But overall it’s a more direct, shallower film.

Critics have hailed this as a career-best performance for Bill Nighy and certainly the sight of him singing the Scottish folk song ‘The Rowan Tree’ is powerfully affecting. Yet deep though his sadness is, it’s also hard to pin down. He shifts from being suicidal to wanting to try and find earthly pleasures. He has too little rapport with the writer Mr. Sutherland to give those scenes any kind of weight at all. Then at the end he somehow finds it in himself to inspire the young Mr. Wakeling despite never really knowing him at all in both his career and his love life. It’s too wishy-washy and sentimental, and the focus on Mr. Wakeling as somehow part of the legacy he leaves behind feels unseemly.

I do like the aesthetic trappings of the film, the look of the London of the era, the stiff upper lip of the bureaucrats, their officiousness towards the Sir James who heads the council and so on. But this is in every way inferior to Ikiru. It’s interesting that they enlisted the famous writer Kazuo Ishiguro to write the screenplay. Perhaps it was meant as a gesture of respect to the Japanese original. But I’m not certain that it was necessary and this might have been a more interesting film if it had transposed more than the superficial elements to a British setting.