Living

By: Robert Warren

It should rain since you forgot your umbrella. That would show you breaking routine. “Living,” is a film by Kazuo Ishiguro that will wake you to see the oppressive office life of an ordinary man, Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy,) and what it means to break a looping or repeating lifestyle.

Copy and pasted cloned men are at a train station. One by one they are no different in attire making them all same. Each have hats duplicating like color by number – a palette of blues, greys and blacks. A colorless life. Briefcases setting no one apart. This is the purposeless life of the working man that can`t escape years like fading into abyss as time passes without even a notice. It`s a sad life. A really sad life. A life ticking to the end. Office work, train stations, repeat until death.

Ishiguro does a really good job with the movie Living as you see Williams transform throughout the script. You begin to learn what it means to be trapped in a life of work with skyscrapers full of files. Transforming begins by zeroing in on your purpose, or one file, that you want to focus and push towards. The way it is written you can see a shift of confidence in Williams and how a new boldness is able to counteract being blown over and how it takes you miles towards your dreams and then spreads to others like wildfire. To win in life you just have to push without leaving your goal on someone’s table to sit. You have to fight for what you want. You have to be a go-getter. Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.” That is what Williams struggles with in this movie – figuring out his why. It isn’t until he finds out he may die, early on in this movie, that he reflects on that sobering fact and then begins to see that his way of life isn’t the life he wants anymore. Going to the office every day to do skyscrapers of paperwork isn’t going to cut it anymore – he wants to go out of the office now and begin an adventurous life.

Not only is the script for Living good but so is the director. Oliver Hermanus directs this film in a way that transforms the heart. You can see through the train station and office where everyone seems the same, cloned, that it takes breaking out the sheltered work life where you can find purpose again. It`s the character Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) that scrapes Williams from his shell into a world completely different.

What makes this movie phenomenal, despite a little bit of a lag to the pacing of the movie, is seeing the gentle man with a kind heart Williams is despite the full circle response to how people see him. Everyone thinks he is living like this zombie, creeping the hall half there in life. That is until he dies where they begin to see another side to him, the genuine man he is. Living is a movie to make you think and reframe your own life from seeing an ordinary man with a heart of gold trying to escape the routines he has been captivated in. Living is a movie to reflect on what it means to be human again.