Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Living’ on Netflix, a Lovely Late-Career Highlight for the Stalwart Bill Nighy (2024)

Stalwart thespian Bill Nighy earned a well-deserved 2023 Oscar nomination for Living (now on Netflix), the British remake of Akira Kurosawa’s humanist masterpiece Ikiru, which was itself based on Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Nighy’s first Oscar nod of a lengthy career ranging from playing villains in Underworld and Pirates of the Caribbean movies to ensemble roles in the Exotic Marigold Hotel films to being part of director Richard Curtis’ stable of actors (Nighy was in About Time and won a BAFTA for his role in Love Actually). In Living he plays a lifelong bureaucrat going through an existential crisis after being diagnosed with terminal illness; although he experiences some regret about the way he lives his life, you’re not likely to feel the same about watching this moving drama.

LIVING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We need an outsider perspective first, and it belongs to Mr. Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), the fresh new hire at a London governmental office that’s stuffed to the brim with people shuffling papers. He meets his buttoned-up coworkers on the commuter train platform, and is advised to stay a few steps behind their boss, Mr. Williams (Nighy), who carries with him an air of authority and superiority. Mr. Williams isn’t THE boss though, as he bows to the Chairman on his way to his desk, at the head of a group of workers best described as administrators, because it’s a vague term that could mean anything, and it’s not quite clear exactly what they do all day, but it’s definitely busy work. Mr. Wakeling – this being Britain in 1953, everybody is referred to by their honorifics – meets his coworker Miss Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood of Sex Education), and she half-jokes that if he maintains a tower of papers on his desk, nobody will even notice he’s there.

We see an example of what happens in this office when three women arrive with a petition. They’d like the city to convert a bombed-out chunk of sewage-ridden concrete into a playground for children, which requires this approval from that department and that permit from this department, and Mr. Wakeling learns a valuable first-day-on-the-job lesson as he leads them up one flight of stairs and through this corridor and into that room and down another flight of stairs and through that corridor and into this room and everyone they meet refers them to a different department and they end up right back where they began, at Mr. Williams’ desk, where he calmly takes their petition and adds it to a pile of paperwork, perhaps to be seen only after civilization collapses and archaeologists of the future dig through the rubble and attempt to piece together how the long-dead bureaucracy functioned, and the thought of them trying to figure it out is deeply funny and ironic, because I’m not sure anyone here in the present moment of this playground petition truly knows how all of this works.

This hapless endeavor has been the whole of Mr. Williams’ life to this point, and to judge his inexpressive face, he never questioned it until now, because he just found out he has six months to live. He takes the diagnosis home and sits in the dark and when his son and daughter-in-law come home, he urges them to sit with him and they decline, oblivious to the fact that something’s clearly wrong. Read into that as you may. He procures many bottles of pills, empties half of his bank account and – what exactly does he intend to do with that? Well, it doesn’t happen. He meets Mr. Sutherland (Tom Burke), a struggling writer, who takes Mr. Williams out, to live a little at clubs and pubs, and he ends up singing a sad, sad song. He then serendipitously meets Miss Harris, who asks him to sign a reference letter for her new job – and they become unlikely friends. A wall or two falls down as they share a bit about themselves, including how she referred to him as “Mr. Zombie” because he was “not dead, but not alive either.” Meanwhile, it’s been weeks since Mr. Williams last showed up at the office; perhaps he no longer lives to work like he did for so, so very long.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s easy to draw a few parallels between Living and the far less-subtle Tom Hanks vehicle A Man Called Otto: Protagonists preoccupied with niggling details in day-to-day routines, contemplating suicide and making platonic friends with younger women who help them establish fresh perspectives on life.

Performance Worth Watching: We’ve seen Nighy be funny and over the top many times before (especially as franchise bad guys), but Living is the exact opposite of those performances, a quiet, stately and mannered characterization colored in shades of longing and regret. It’s easily the most accomplished and thoughtful performance of his long, diverse career.

Memorable Dialogue: “I have a little Scotch in me.” – Mr. Williams drops a double-entendre when he steps up to sing an old Scottish song

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (author of the novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day) shifts the setting of Ikiru to postwar London so they may couch the story within 1,000 microvariations of mannerly British politeness, including those that seem polite but aren’t very polite at all. It’s an inspired choice, and Living comes off as a classical parable in a vein similar to Ebenezer Scrooge’s existential crisis of conscience. On its face, the film is emotionally stripped down, even sentimental at times, but the richness and clarity of Nighy’s performance prompts us to read into the character, to ponder how and why he got to this place of profound detachment. His professional subordinates stay a few steps behind him on the sidewalk; the citizens requesting his assistance get the runaround; he’s emotionally estranged from his son even though they live in the same house.

How did Mr. Williams get this way? That’s when conjecture finds root and blooms. I see a willful devotion to conformity and propriety. I see a workaholic who committed himself to the least important things in life. I see a rigid man who can only be shaken from routine by tragedy. I see a long-delayed expansion of self-awareness. I see someone who needs to look outside his tiny sphere for a second chance – and thankfully finds some kindness, in Mr. Sutherland and especially Miss Harris. When Nighy and Wood share the screen – they share a wonderful, natural chemistry – nothing seems too late, or hopeless.

There’s a kind of bleak comedy embedded in Living’s depiction of the Establishment, its inefficiency and emotional detachment. It seems to have swallowed our protagonist, who perhaps allowed it to happen willingly; emotions are messy and chaotic, and at least the workday brings the illusion of order to the world. And yet, that structure has enslaved him. There’s nothing quite so heartbreaking as hearing Mr. Williams confess to a stranger that his plan to have fun, to “live a little,” fails because he simply doesn’t know how. A simple moment like that might seem trite and sentimental in another context, one less committed to the suggestive details of setting and nonverbal expression. Hermanus, Ishiguro, Nighy and Wood together find a richly exquisite intersection of time and place and character, and the result is quietly profound.

Our Call: Living yields a late-career peak for Nighy, and a moving experience for the rest of us. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.