LIVING movie
This poignant drama, about a London bureaucrat who decides to turn his hollow life into something wonderful before it’s too late, is “note-perfect,” critic Adam Graham writes in The Detroit News.
“An absolutely gorgeous, heartbreaking piece of work,” critic David Fear writes in Rolling Stone.
“Defies expectations at every turn,” Max Weiss writes in Baltimore magazine.
“A bona fide cinematic treat,” Brian Viner writes in London’s Daily Mail.
Rodney Williams (Bill Nighy) is a senior county Public Works functionary in 1953 London who spends his days, as he has for decades, shuffling papers that never seem to get where they’re supposed to go.
When he leaves work in his still-neatly tailored suit and bowler hat, Williams goes home and sits with his son, Michael (Barney Fishwick), and daughter-in-law, Fiona (Patsy Ferran), making polite, empty conversation.
What finally pushes Williams, a widower, out of his deadening routine is the imminence of actual death. His doctor tells him he has six months to live.
This bombshell barely causes a ripple on Williams’s stiff upper lip. But he later decides he has been wasting his life and wants to reclaim something with whatever time he has left — if he only knew how.
The film is adapted from the classic Japanese 1952 film “Ikiru,” which was in turn inspired by the 1886 Russian novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy.
“Living,” released in 2022, earned 10 festival and critic awards. The awards include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association honor for Best Lead Performance for Nighy and a National Board of Review prize as one of the year’s Top 10 Independent Films.
The movie runs 1 hour 42 minutes and is rated PG-13. Its trailer can be found on YouTube at tinyurl.com/Living-MoviesWSpirit.
The screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion. Refreshments will be served.
Attendees over age 12 are asked to contribute $10 a person.
Movies With Spirit screenings comply with all federal, state and local health and safety protocols, including those of the screening venues.
The monthly Movies With Spirit series, organized by Gerry Harrington of Kingston, seeks to stimulate people’s sense of joy and wonder, inspire love and compassion, evoke a deepened understanding of people’s integral connection with others and with life itself, and support individual cultures, faith paths and beliefs while simultaneously transcending them.
The films are screened in diverse places of worship and reverence across Ulster and Dutchess counties at 7 p.m., generally on the third Saturday of every month. Movies With Spirit has no religious affiliation.
