Not long into "Living," Mr. Williams learns that he has not long to live. The news doesn't come as a huge shock, but even if it did, you gather, nothing about this man — not his stiff posture, his calmly appraising gaze or his thin, flat line of a mouth — would betray anything resembling devastation or even surprise. We are in 1950s London, and Mr. Williams, who's spent more than two decades toiling away in the county hall's Public Works department, has encased himself in a shell of propriety, receiving every new document and file with unfailing politeness and unflappable calm. Why should his response to his own demise — in six months to a year, max — be any different?
Here it should be noted that Mr. Williams is played by Bill Nighy, for whom a show of restraint is never just a show of restraint. Within emotional parameters that other actors might have found gloomily constricting, Nighy coaxes forth a tour de force of understatement, suffused with an almost musical melancholy. His performance, which won a lead acting prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association earlier this month, is a gorgeous minor-key symphony of downcast gazes and soft-spoken pronouncements, lightened occasionally by a faint little ghost of a smile. There's a whisper of humor to Mr. Williams, a sense of irony about a death sentence that he keeps secret from all but a trusted few. In the movie's best moments, Nighy lures you into the impression that he's sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.
At one point you might flash back to "Love Actually," specifically a line from one of Nighy's funniest, most famous performances: "And now I'm left with no one, wrinkled and alone!" But Mr. Williams is not one for flamboyant self-pity, and "Living," thankfully, will never be mistaken for "Life Actually." Exquisitely directed by Oliver Hermanus from a spare, elegant script by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, the movie is a faithful English-language reimagining of "Ikiru," Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about a Tokyo widower who receives a terminal stomach-cancer diagnosis and turns over a startling new leaf.
