It's probably not fair, this season especially, to recoil at the remaking of a classic. 鈥淎 Christmas Carol," for one, has been told and retold countless times, and who among us won't jump at the chance to watch the Muppets or Bill Murray do their version of Dickens.
Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film has no holiday connection, but it likewise concerns the late-in-life redemption of an old man whose awakening comes amid softly falling snow. There's a good case to be made that 鈥淚kiru,鈥� with its sublime sense of sorrow and compassion and its stunning third-act perspective switch, ought to be staged and restaged annually like 鈥淎 Christmas Carol," to perennially stir our spirits. 鈥淚kiru,鈥� after all, drew from the at-death's-door existentialism of Leo Tolstoy鈥檚 鈥淭he Death of Ivan Ilyich.鈥�
And yet, I can't help a 鈥渂ah humbug鈥� welling up in me over Oliver Hermanus' coolly elegant 鈥泪办颈谤耻鈥� remake, The film, written by the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, is a handsome piece of work and finely acted, particularly Bill Nighy, who stars as a British civil servant named Mr. Williams.
But, well, it's an inalienable right that if your heart belongs to a movie, you can skeptically eye any remake. My grip on 鈥泪办颈谤耻鈥� (which translates as 鈥淭o Live鈥�) may be too tight to loosen that bias and embrace this dispassionate, eminently British spin on near- sacred cinematic ground. But I found it too neatly arranged, too crisply composed to register as much more than a pale reflection.
The first thing you notice about 鈥淟iving鈥� is its starkly stylish photography. Hermanus, the South African filmmaker of and his cinematographer, Jamie D. Ramsay, open the film with a chorus of bowler hats and pinstriped suits on a train platform outside London in 1953. As exquisite as the images are, their formal beauty enhances the sense that 鈥淟iving" is more content at an artful remove from daily life than earnestly reckoning with it.
Of course, no one does repression quite like Ishiguro, author of 鈥淭he Remains of the Day鈥� and 鈥淣ever Let Me Go.鈥� In transferring 鈥泪办颈谤耻鈥� to midcentury England he's taken dead aim at a traditional notion of gentlemanliness and a classic sense of Britishness. We're introduced to this world not by Mr. Williams but a new hire named Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp) in the Public Works department. It's there where Mr. Williams quietly rules over a hushed corner of sprawling bureaucracy and 鈥渟kyscrapers鈥� of paperwork. On the train platform, some veteran colleagues hint at the severity Peter is walking into. After speaking a little too excitedly, one advises, 鈥淣ot too much fun and laughter, rather like church.鈥�
Much the same could be said of 鈥淟iving,鈥� more of a museum piece than its title suggests. Inside the Public Works office, Mr. Williams sits hunched over papers that either transfers to some other department or adds to the pile. 鈥淲e can keep it here,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here's no harm.鈥�
It's striking to hear Nighy's voice so colorless and see his manner so stiff. His best performances are much more vibrant than his in 鈥淟iving,鈥� ironically enough. But Nighy has impressively drained himself of the wit and charm that usually flows naturally out of him, adding a tension to 鈥淟颈惫颈苍驳.鈥� We know that deep down there's a more animated soul in Mr. Williams.
When Mr. Williams is diagnosed with a fatal cancer and given a few months to live, the way Hermanus and Ishiguro play the scene couldn't be in starker contrast to Kurosawa. In 鈥淚kiru,鈥� Takashi Shimura's Kanji Watanabe is told by a doctor that it's just an ulcer, a lie that both he and we know to be a cover for stomach cancer. Despair is written all over Shimura's face. In 鈥淟iving,鈥� the doctor gives it to him straight and unemotionally. 鈥淚t's never easy, this,鈥� he says. 鈥淨uite,鈥� replies Mr. Williams.
He is, as his young, livelier colleague Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) later describes her impression of him, 鈥渟ort of dead but not dead.鈥� With his life given an expiration date, Mr. Williams slowly begins to throw off his habits of propriety. A gentleman, he says a little regretfully, 鈥渋s what I longed to be.鈥�
In stolen moments with Margaret, he begins grasping his last bits of life. It's here that you would expect most any modern telling of 鈥泪办颈谤耻鈥� to slide into sentimentality. The dryness of 鈥淟iving," to its credit, avoids those pitfalls, and, overall, has trimmed Kurosawa's tale into a more focused 102 minutes. But there's a stale emptiness to 鈥淟iving鈥� that doesn't entirely dissipate in even its most moving scenes. When Mr. Williams devotes himself to seeing through a local playground 鈥� his first and last bid to make something lasting outside of the daily grind 鈥� the crescendo is again both affecting and disquieting. Because it's told, after his death, through the gossipy chatter of colleagues, 鈥淟iving鈥� leaves you with a melancholy puzzlement: Why does it take death to allow anyone to truly live?
鈥淟iving,鈥� a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 102 minutes. Two stars out of four.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
