Review: 'Living' is quietly emotional, and a Oscar-nominated showcase for Bill Nighy

Like the main character that has given Bill Nighy his long-deserved Academy Award nomination, director Oliver Hermanus’ “Living” is elegant and emotionally restrained — but with a massive heart beating underneath that placid surface.

Nighy plays Rodney Williams, a civil servant who has worked for decades in the public works department in London. The movie starts somewhere around 1950, after World War II, and Williams — having received a diagnosis that he has a terminal cancer — is realizing that his life of filing away papers and wrapping proposals in red tape isn’t fulfilling.

First, he decides to flee London, his work, and his son Michael (Barney Fishwick) and his daughter-in-law Fiona (Patsy Ferran), for the seaside, with half of his life’s savings with him. In a coastal town, he is befriended by a garrulous playwright (Tom Burke), who gives him a tour of the arcades and burlesques of the town. That turns out to be unsatisfying, too.

Back in London, he continues to play hooky from work, and spends a pleasant afternoon with a young woman, Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), who recently left Williams’ office for another job. She ultimately cajoles him to return to the public works department — but he’s a changed man, his colleagues notice, suddenly eager to push forward projects he used to bury.

If this story sounds familiar, then you’re a fan of classic arthouse movies. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru,” adapted with precisely controlled emotions by novelist Kazoo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), who also got an Academy Award nomination this week.

Hermanus and Ishiguro establish with a few light brushstrokes the stifling conformity in which Williams has lived much of his life — riding the same train every morning that his junior staffers do, sitting at the same desks and forming what Miss Harris calls “skyscrapers” of bureaucratic files. It’s all painstakingly realized, and the perfect cage from which Williams so desperately wants to escape.

Nighy does give a career-high performance here, going from quiet acceptance to melancholy to a resolve to make something of his life, no matter how short that life will be. Nighy makes “Living” a story that will move the viewer to tears — and to examining what one is doing with their life.

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‘Living’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 27, in select theaters. Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 102 minutes.