Kelvin Harrison, Jr. has the title role, that of “Chevalier de Saint-Georges,” fiddler and swordsman Joseph Bologne, playing and competing his way into royal circles in pre-Revolutionary France.
Samara Weaving, Lucy Boynton, Ronke Adekoluejo and Minnie Driver also star, playing folks who either encourage this young 18th century man of talent, or tell him “You don’t belong here…You’re a party trick!”
April 23, this comes our way.
Sweet, slow and unassuming, “Sam & Kate” is a romantic melodrama that came into being because two Oscar winners relished the chance to act on screen with their acting progeny. So whatever sparks Sissy Spacek and Dustin Hoffman set off in their scenes together are augmented by the pleasure of their kids playing the long-suffering offspring of two very different and sometimes difficult — downright prickly — elderly parents.
A small town in Georgia is the setting. How small? Well, somehow, the folks who might be the only resident Jews there have a church they’re not shy about attending, especially when Christmas programs roll around.
Hoffman plays Bill, a widowed curmudgeon inclined to stir up trouble, even from the seat of a store-provided scooter at their local home improvement warehouse.
“You don’t like me but I like YOU,” is his re-assurance that his kvetching and kvelling to the only employee on duty is all in good fun.
Jake Hoffman is long-suffering Sam, who is over 30, still lives with the old man, still works at the local candy factory and still takes weed brakes with his musician stoner pal (Henry Thomas) and still has no direction in his life and no clue what to do when he first casts his eyes on the lovely bookstore owner with the long, auburn hair.
Kate (Schulyer Fisk) has an electric smile and a friendly manner, even when she’s shooting down this persistent not-really-a-customer who clumsily makes his desire for her phone number obvious.
“I’m not really dating right now.”
But that church, and that Christmas sermon and performance gives him another chance. Not exactly. Kate’s car won’t start, stranding her and her mom Tina (Spacek) after the service. Jake is quick…to let his mechanically-inclined dad take a look, and just as quick to let Dad suggest that they give the ladies a lift, as it’s not just a dead battery.
Thus begin two sort-of courtships, with bluff and temperamental Bill charmed by the ethereal Tina, and Sam wholly smitten with Tina’s daughter.
But you know how romances and rom-coms work, especially the ones labeled “melodramatic.” We need “obstacles.” Everybody has her or his “secret.” Everybody has “issues.” Some seem solvable, within the 110 minutes of this should-be-90-minute dramedy. Some won’t.
The young couple gets most of the screen time here, even if their accomplished parents out-sizzle and outshine them, especially in the early going.
Hoffman the elder is amusingly brittle and snippy about his “talented” son. “Maybe some day he’ll do something with it.” Bill shrugs off doctor’s orders and knows his days are limited.
“I’m on GRAVY time!”
The father-son arguments here can seem contrived, but relatable. It’s the mother-daughter disagreements that ring truest, downright triggering. Their “secrets” are the bigger ones.
Thomas, the “E.T.” kid, leans into his supporting role and lays back in his line-readings, creating a fun “local character” in just a few scenes. If you’ve not followed the fact that he now sings and plays guitar, you’re in for a treat.
There are just enough of those treats in the painfully “out of your league, dude” attempted courtship of Sam and Kate, and in the sparkle of Spacek and the bite of Hoffman to make this sweet nothing of a movie worth your while.
The character arcs are predictable, and abruptly traversed at times in actor-turned writer-director Darren Le Gallo’s debut feature. Yes, he got lucky with his casting. Yes, few are likely to get that lucky a second time, in that regard.
But as long as their are little lives worth a little intense scrutiny, there’ll be indie films like “Sam & Kate,” pleasant diversions that give legendary stars the indulgence of a victory lap, this time with their kids along for the ride.
Rating: R for some drug use and (profanity).
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Sissy Spacek, Schuyler Fisk, Jake Hoffman and Henry Thomas.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Darren Le Gallo. A Vertical release.
Running time: 1:50
It promises to be emotional, because everybody who loves good acting misses Chadwick Bozeman, even those of us who aren’t fanboys and were underwhelmed by his green screen turn in this blockbuster.
He was great in “Get on Up” and “Marshall,” good in “42,” and he had a great career in front of him. Let’s hope the movie’s tribute is fitting, and that the post Chadwick world they’ve built is more interesting and layered than the first outing.
“The Takeover” is a brisk-enough but seriously formulaic Dutch thriller about a hacker being chased by villains she’s crossed and hunted for a murder she’s been framed for but didn’t commit.
So it’s a little like a lot of “coder/hacker” thrillers. Take Sandra Bullock’s “The Net,” for instance.
There’s some suspicious code that the hacker finds in a Dutch company’s new self-driving bus software.
Wait, there’s a bus? So we know what screenwriters Tijs van Marle and Hans Erik Kraan were doing the weekend they roughed this roughhousing chase picture script out — a Sandra Bullock binge fest!
It’s to their credit that knowing those antecedents doesn’t give the whole movie away. But it’d be seriously short of surprises even if you didn’t pick up on that pretty early on — like two or three scenes in.
Holly Mae Brood (“All You Need is Love”) is Mel, the lovely brunette in peril this time, a hacker taken under the wing of an OG “hacker” turned “cyber security specialist” named Buddy back when Mel was a teen.
That’s a cute scene. She’s shutting down a local airbase’s air traffic control from a PC in her parents’ garage when we meet her. Doesn’t like the noise from all the constant flyovers.
Buddy (Frank Lammers of “Black Book” and “Ferry”) seems sympathetic.
Cut to ten years later, and Mel B. is on her own, working for a company that has to sign off on the software that will run Rotterdam’s first self-driving bus. Mel sees something wrong, sets up a “Trojan Horse” to foil whoever is stealing data from the bus. For an encore, she joins her online international hacking co-op to rob from rich blackmailing hackers and donate “their crypto to charity.”
When two guys break into her apartment, all bets are off. She’s pissed off the wrong SOMEbody somewhere.
She figures out fast that she can’t trust the cops. She figures out faster that somebody’s faked a video that frames her for murder. And with her phone traced and her apartment watched, she has nowhere to run.
EXCEPT for the flat of hapless Thomas (Géza Weisz) a gauche and goofy blind date that went nowhere the night before.
There’s this villain who keeps calling with threats. He (Lawrence Sheldon) is fond of black leather gloves and Audis, just like every other bad guy in a Euro thriller.
“Make the right decision and I won’t kill you,” he purrs — in English because that’s what he speaks in either the Dutch or English-dubbed versions of this.
The chases are routine, the action beats pretty much punched out according to formula and the finale we can see from the film’s second scene.
Still, there are some laughs from the under-estimatable Thomas and Brood runs likes she means it and throws a punch like a hacker who keeps a punching bag in her flat to practice. Which she does.
Not enough here to recommend “The Takeover,” but if you’ve never seen a Sandra Bullock thriller from the ’90s, it’ll all seem new to you.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity
Cast: Holly Mae Brood, Géza Weisz, Frank Lammers, Walid Benmbarek and Lawrence Sheldon
Credits: Directed by Annemarie Van De Mond, scripted by Tijs van Marle and Hans Erik Kraan. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
There wasn’t much point in filming another version of Eric Maria Remaraque’s classic anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
There are other films of it out there, each worthwhile in its own way. And we’ve had “1917,” “The War Below,” “War Horse” and “Journey’s End” in the last few years, taking us deeper and deeper into the horrors of the Western Front meatgrinder of the trenches of France.
So director and co-writer Edward Berger and his German team didn’t “remake” “All Quiet.” They added points of view to the narrowly-focused grunts-eye-view novel.
We see the troubling Armistice negotiations and the first flashes of the original fascist “Big Lie,” that the German army was “stabbed in the back” by “liberal” politicians, ignoring the fact that the army had a hand in starting the war and was wholly responsible for losing it.
A sputtering Prussian general (Devid Streisow) fumes that “The Social Democrats will be the end of mankind!”
The ending is changed just enough to preserve its message of the futility and waste of this most futile and wasteful war, with its staggering slaughter and inhumanity, while soberly fixing on the demagogues who started it and could not wait to foment the dissent that would lead to the next one.
But if you remember the story or earlier films, you will recognize what’s happening and who it is happening to, and lose yourself in another filmed immersion in life and death in the trenches, in “no man’s land” — death by bullet or bayonet, gas or gangrene.
Felix Kammerer is Paul Bäumer, the school boy who joins up with his entire class, which enlists en masse in 1917. Their head master (Michael Wittenborn) exhorts them, “the iron youth of Germany,” to go and make quick work of the French and the British, and the just-declared-war Americans.
Paul and his comrades muster in, endure their first “tests” from their lieutenant, and struggled for 18 months of thin rations and low-survival rates as “dead men walking,” which Paul jokes that they are as they exchange their school uniforms for the army’s.
But Berger — who made “Jack” and has worked in German television — opens his film with a bravura, mostly dialogue-free combat sequence, watching a soldier cope with the shock of shelling, the terror of going “over the top,” the panic of not being able to get his bolt-action G98 rifle to fire and eventually his death.
We see the body picked up, stripped and the uniform washed, patched and recycled. That’s what Paul is putting on, a dead man’s clothes. He’s just a cog in the German war machine, fresh meat for the grinder.
“Truth is the first casualty of war” is underscored, right from the start. These boys are being sent into battle to feed the machine, which despite successes against Russia, has failed to break through in the West. They aren’t warned that three years into this war, Germany is not much closer to winning.
And the fact that Germany is forced to re-use the uniforms of the dead doesn’t suggest “victory” is anywhere in sight.
The novel, like this version of it on screen, tracks the death of innocence — naively stumbling into first combat, seeing comrades fall, one by one, meeting the grizzled veteran/bunker philosopher Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch). A raid on a French farm here, a flirtation with a farm girl there, all tucked into months of charges or fending off enemy charges, struggling to stay alive as their idealism dies one day at a time.
Berger and cinematographer James Friend — with a little digital help here and there — paint the panorama of war on a wide canvas, a portrait in mud, blood and rotting shades of grey. The fights are close-up, intimate, filmed tight to make them grimly personal.
The soundtrack is silence interrupted by cacophonous combat, grunts and panting and yelps and the whizz of bullets, the rattle of machine guns and blasts from artillery and grenades. Composer Volker Bertelmann brilliantly augments this with a metallic “Inception” inspired score of bass rumbles and brass blasts and the startling crack of drumsticks on a drum’s rim or solitary, abrupt pops on the head of the snare drum.
Daniel Brühl, playing a civilian official negotiating the coming armistice, stands out in the cast by being the most familiar face to international audiences (“”Rush,” “Captain America: Civil War”). The players are good, but Berger seems far more committed to the vast mural he’s painting than to the individual journeys. There was more pathos in the most famous Hollywood version of this story, even in the 1979 TV movie, than anyone here is able to summon up.
I found “1917” more visceral and engaging, “War Horse” more moving. At this point, the novelty of this nightmare has worn off, its ability to shock modern audiences by recreating the cold, gory realities of “The Great War” is gone.
But all involved are to be commended for taking a shot at modernizing a classic novel and rendering it into another lesson that history does repeat itself, that as the philosopher said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, smoking
Cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Moritz Klaus, Aaron Hilmer, Adrian Grünewald, Devid Streisow and Daniel Brühl
Credits: Directed by Edward Berger, scripted by Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, based on the novel by Eric Maria Remarque. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:38
One more big double-digit weekend take from Dwayne Johnson and the DC/Warners team, a whopping $18.5 million more for “Black Adam.” That pushes it over $123 million, and counting.
But that count is going to plummet as it loses screens and mojo from “Wakanda Forever” next weekend.
“One Piece Film: Red” is another chunka change for ChunkyRoll, an anime release that its fanbase showed up for — $9.4 million. I may get to that one this week.
“Ticket to Paradise” is reaching its older audience, with a terrific “hold” on its third weekend — $8.5 million. Julia and George have legs!
I was thinking “Smile” would clear the $100 million mark this weekend. It added $4, and it stands at over $96 now. Maybe late next week, by Sat?
The middling horror competition, “Prey for the Devil,” added $3.8. It’s all found money when your cast/production costs are this low.
“The Banshees of Inisherin” didn’t crack the top five, more on that later.
The weekend figures and this illustration is from @boxofficepro on Twitter, overall take from BoxOfficeMojo.com.
The first mystery of “Stars at Noon” is just who and what this character, Trish Johnson really is?
She tells one and all she’s a “periodista,” a journalist. Since she’s paying for her drinks with cordobas, we can guess she’s in Nicaragua. And since she drinks a lot, maybe we buy the “periodista” label.
But she gives no sign she takes notes or photographs. There’s little about her slinky sun dress that says “professional.” Well, not that profession.
That Brit she’s met in the bar of the swank Hotel Intercontinental asks her directly, “Are you for sale?”
“I’m press.” But she doesn’t seem offended, just claiming the proper credentials.
“We’re all press here,” he shrugs. One drink later, things turn back to transactional.
“For a price I’ll sleep with you.”
Mysteries matter in the films of Claire Denis, who makes movies in which story drifts into the background as characters, settings and predicaments move to the fore. Think of her “Chocolat,” French and set in Cameroon, or the Robert Pattinson father-daughter-in-space tale “High Life,” or “White Material.” It’s the patient, meandering storytelling, the ordinary characters who make tenuous connections and conjure up the unexpected, the dreamy tone that sticks with you.
Margaret Qualley plays Trish, bringing that laid-back, go-with-the-flow vibe she brought to “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” with her. We don’t know how Trish got into Nicaragua. But we can tell she’s stranded there and that this is getting to her. The “how” and the “why” only become a little clearer with time.
An Army lieutenant (Nick Romano) she has a regular thing with gives her a post coital chewing out.
“You’re NOT a journalist!” “I am TOO!”
A call to a guy she regards as her editor/”employer” (John C. Reilly) back in the States sets her and us straight. No, he’s not sending her money. No, she’s not doing a “piece” for him.
“Just admit to yourself that you’re not a journalist.”
But this Englishman (Joe Alwyn of “Mary Queen of Scots” and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”) she’s watched hanging around with “cops” or “Costa Ricans” intrigues her. There’s an election going on, which she expects to be delayed, whose delays have something to do with why she can’t get out of the country. And the Brit, who might quip unflatteringly about her sex worker status, can meet her price “in DOLLARS.” He might be trouble, but he could be her ticket home.
The film, based on a Denis Johnson novel, serves up Qualley as the prettiest “Ugly American” we’ve ever seen — sexy and unabashed, semi-fluent in Spanish and prone to “when American tanks come and CRUSH your country” tirades when she runs into the petty corruption, the lax Central American “mañana” attitudes and Catch-22s of being stuck in a place with no easy way out.
Somebody broke her phone. Somebody took her passport. And that’s before she takes up with this sketchy, apparently-married and somewhat posh Brit with linen suits and a gun, who says he’s here for “consulting” with an oil company — in the middle of another harrowing election in a corner of the world where that’s the norm.
Denis keeps the intrigues murky and the motives murkier as our couple’s predicament grows more dire. I never bought into the love story supposedly budding here, but that’s kind of the point. Who is using whom?
Is Trish really the one with the spycraft in this “partnership,” clever enough to know how to dodge that tricked-out Jeep full of “Costa Ricans?” Is Daniel in over his head, too?
Costa Ricans seem to be everybody’s favorite villain in Nicaragua, CIA stooges doing the gringos’ dirty work. But that doesn’t mean the “real” CIA won’t show up. He (Bennie Safdie) may be obvious, but he’s not going to admit to owning any part of Trish and Daniel’s predicament, or answer a single direct question, no matter how many ways you ask it.
That diffuse plot and emotional disconnection between the leads creates a remove in the film that keeps it at arm’s length. There are coherence issues as well.
But Qualley conjures up another loose, louche and sometimes shoeless (A jab at Tarantino?) free spirit, this time one drifting through a situation whose difficulties she acknowledges even as she tries to ignore the perils.
As “Stars at Noon” unfolds, Denis summons up memories of lots of movies set in this part of the world or any part of the Third World where elections are held and The Game of Nations is played. The foreigners come in and some locals die, and then the foreigners leave and no one really knows if anything was made better or worse except for the dead. And nobody’s asking them.
Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence.
Cast: Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Nick Romano and Benny Safdie
Credits: Directed by Claire Denis, scripted by Claire Denis and Andrew Litvak, based on a novel by Denis Johnson. An A24 release.
Running time: 2:14
The folks releasing “Resistance 1942” should have kept this WWII thriller’s original title “Burning at Both Ends,” for starters. That’s not only more poetic, but retitling without re-editing the picture you’ve decided to distribute can get you into trouble, too.
Although “Resistance,” which stars Cary Elwes, Greer Grammer (daughter of Kelsey), Judd Hirsch, Sebastian Roché and Jason Patric, has a sequence set in 1942 France, intertitles foolishly, needlessly and quickly advance this fictional claptrap into 1943 and set the entire third act in 1944.
It’s about an underground radio personality who broadcasts from an attic hideaway, a lone voice imploring whoever might be listening to keep “the flame of hope alight…Remember to trim your wicks, my friends. For the darkness soon will pass.”
Elwes is Jacques, that voice in Nazi/fascist occupied Lyon, France. He’s in hiding in an attic with his daughter (Grammer), an elderly Jewish couple (Hirsch and the late Mira Furlan) and another young fellow (T.W. Leshner), sending the young folks out to scavenge for food and retrieve vacuum tubes to keep Jacques’ transmitter/receiver gear in order.
Roché plays the Gestapo officer obsessed with silencing this “Jacques.”
“Interview every man called ‘Jacques’ in this city!” he commands, giving away why the Germans lost the war in a sentence.
The girl is so pretty she gets attention whenever she leaves the attic, and that leads to unwanted uniformed attention. A chase sends her into a random office to hide. And that’s how the banker Andre (Patric) gets mixed up in their plight.
Years pass with them under his protection. But pushy Germans demand a swank Dinner with Nazis gathering in his villa outside the city, putting everybody in their greatest peril ever.
I guess Hirsch’s grandson or somebody sharing his surname came up with the “story” of this screenplay, leaving it to the hapless writers/directors to make it work.
It’s not enough to get the uniforms right, the black leather Nazi overcoats and black leather Nazi gloves, the “Heil Hitlers” and Lugers anti-Semitism and the uneasy collaboration with the Vichy French police. You’ve got to keep the story moving and the suspense building.
After a brief and moving newsreel summary-of-the-war opening, “Resistance” skips forward in time without much narrative reason, and no narrative rhyme. The hidden quintet keeps the Jewish Sabbath and Jacques keeps hope alive, but the story wanders into the weeds when everybody ends up at that swank villa.
Scenes are clunky and disjointed. The dialogue is bad. Elwes and Patric do their best, but they have trouble hiding their dismay at some of the staging and most of the writing. The performances are adequate in the most tepid sense. Playing caricatures instead of characters is challenging.
This is exactly the sort of WWII movie you can do on the (relative) cheap. But before jumping in, you need to know a little more about the radio component of the story and radio components of the day. The Nazis record Jacques’ broadcasts on a 1970s vintage reel-to-reel deck, and the suggestion is given that an awful lot of Frenchmen — and women — had radio transmitter/receivers just like Jacques.
So I guess all those British SOE drops of such gear were for naught? Those were rare, the French police and Germans seized radio gear of all types, and arrested people just for listening to the wrong broadcasts. There’s no instance I could find of any “underground” station like this.
SOMEbody, perhaps the relative of one of the stars who came up with this story, misunderstands the fundamental difference between “underground radio stations” of WWII and “Pump up the Volume.”
Not that the rest of this disorganized dalliance in “Resistance” makes any more sense.
Rating: Unrated, violence
Cast: Cary Elwes, Greer Grammer, Sebastian Roché, Mira Furlan, Judd Hirsch and Jason Patric
Credits: Scripted and directed by Matthew Hill and Landon Johnson. A Quiver release.
Running time: 1:50
Unicorns, for those who missed the memo, have joined magical reindeer, jolly elves and Tim Allen as fixtures in “The Magic of Christmas.”
Which is what explains “A Unicorn for Christmas,” a Hallmark Lite kids’ movie that found its way into some cinemas while no one was watching the store.
It’s not so much a “sweet nothing” as a “nothing nothing” of a holiday movie, bearing evidence that it’s been cut and a lot has been left out. And judging from what made this release print, the edits were no great loss.
Izzy, a tween-looking “little girl” (Abby James Witherspoon) who is all wrapped up in some “Unicorn Universe” TV show (Not seen. Edited out?) creates her own fan fiction out of that show to impress her NYC BFF. Sure, she’s way too old (looking) for that. But she’s off to “the farm” for Christmas, so maybe DVR the “Unicorn Universe Live Holiday Special.”
The “farm” here isn’t exactly explained. Did Dad (Chuck Wicks) inherit it? Did he buy it, sight unseen? Because the wife (Sunny Mabrey) and kids (Christian Finlayson is teen son Max) are thrown onto it, running it and setting up a petting zoo for the annual Christmas carnival in Chestnut Hollow.
The zoo, with cows, chickens, goats and llamas, isn’t much of a draw until little Izzy sees an undersized pony that the lady (Catherine Dyer) who runs sleigh rides lets her borrow for the zoo.
Izzy sees the sparkly digital effect horn, the “Snowflake” imprinted on its hoof, giving away who she/he is. But no adult can.
Kids flock to the petting zoo for the chance to ride on a unicorn. It’s “our own little Christmas miracle,” the family figures.
Football and “Hill Street Blues” alumnus Ed Marinaro shows up as Horace, the shady hustler who runs the town carnival and sees real money in this petting zoo attraction. He’s the best thing in the movie, and maybe its best moment is sketchy Horace getting a glimpse of what the kids see through a tiny tyke’s glasses. He MUST have that unicorn!
The plot is watered-down (baby) formula, and the dialogue insipid, inane or just plane nonsensical.
“You’re just like those gingerbread cookies,” our heroine tells Snowflake. “They don’t stand out 11 months of the year. But then December rolls around. You smell gingerbread and you’re instantly in the Christmas spirit.”
Say what now?
So go ahead, get the inflatable snowman set up and the lights hung all around the house. Insert those Santa legs dangling out of the chimney and make sure Rudolph & Co. are secured to the roof.
But if you don’t have a unicorn in the mix, you’re just not keeping up.
Rating: unrated, treacly PG
Cast: Abby James Witherspoon, Sunny Mabrey, Christian Finlayson, Chuck Wicks, Catherine Dyer, Charlene Tilton and Ed Marinaro
Credits: Directed by Stacia Crawford, scripted by Haven McCord. A Level 33 release.
Running time: 1:26
A sublime, subdued performance by Bill Nighy is reason enough to bask in the glory that is “Living,” a lovely period piece about a civil servant who questions what purpose his life has served when he’s told he has six months to live.
Yes, that plot is a tad familiar. But it wasn’t when Akira Kurosawa filmed “Ikiru” back in 1952, which is the basis for this Kazuo Ishiguro (“Remains of the Day”) screenplay. Seeing Nighy and the legions of other ever-so-reserved paper-shufflers in their bowler hats, queuing up for the day’s train commute into postwar London, you’d think it was an English story all along. Civil service functionaries are a universal “type.” Only the hats change.
A new man (Alex Sharp) has joined the day’s train ride to County Hall. There’s a pecking order which second-in-command Middleton (Adrian Rawlins) imparts to young Wakeling. Hart and Rusbridger (Oliver Chris and Hubert Burton) know their places. Their boss, Mr. Williamson (Nighy) knows his, too. He always rides in a separate car.
It’s 1949, and their planning office has a Dickensian quiet about it — the light patter of typewriters, a distant phone here and there with the shuffling of papers and scribbling of pens the true background noise of the place.
It is Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood of Netflix’s “Sex Education” series) who tips the new gent how to fit in. Those stacks of folders and files on everybody’s desk? They’re “skyscrapers,” proof that they’re “working.”
“First rule? Keep the skyscrapers high.”
But for all this British efficiency, the whole idea seems to be to take in more paper, but kick everything from one office to the next so that nothing ever is truly decided or finished. Nothing gets done, or at least, gets done in anything like a timely fashion. Wakeling figures that out when his first day initiation involves escorting a group of women who have petitioned for a bombed-out building to be turned into a playground for their children.
Quiet, calm Mr. Williamson takes it all in stride, and always suggests that they “leave it here,” where it can be added to the mountain of other papers. “What harm could it do?”
But the widowed Mr. Williamson, who lives with his impatient son and daughter-in-law (Barry Fishwick and Patsy Ferran) is about to get some bad news. It’s his doctor. The results were “conclusive.”
“It’s never easy, this,” the physician obfuscates. “Quite” is all the patient can say in reply.
Williamson proceeds to “skive off” from work and struggle with this new state of affairs. He doesn’t weep. He’s just morose.
He empties out a bank account and takes off for a day down in the tourist town of Brighton, where he confides in a local playwright and tippler (Tom Burke).
Six months? That’s “enough time to get your affairs in order,” Sullivan opines, and “live a little, if you choose to.”
But as his new friend leads him through the beach town’s pleasures and amusements, Williamson figures out what we figure out. That he’s not used to this, or good at it.
Williamson’s just Scottish enough to know the folk song “The Rowan Tree,” and attempt to sing it in a waterfront pub, not exactly a pub tune.
“I fancy it just crept up on me, one day preceding the next” is how he figures the rigor mortis that is his life happened. Probably too late to do anything about it now.
The production design is immaculate. It’d have to be, considering the beautiful (Technicolor, I think) stock footage of 1940s London street scenes that opens the film. Austere and reserved classic music — solo piano or chamber pieces — sets the aural tone.
South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus (“Moffie”) takes a light hand on the tiller here, letting Nighy keep his character reserved, repressed, sentimental — there’s a flashback or two — and resigned.
And if there’s one overriding, aching thing anyone takes from this and the original Japanese film it is based on, which I haven’t seen in decades, it’s the loneliness that comes at the end. Williamson wonders what he’s done with his life and how to bring himself to tell his son he’s dying.
Perhaps he’s afraid of his boy’s reaction.
He is seen out and about with Miss Harris, which raises eyebrows on the screen and in the audience. But the way Nighy carries himself here and carries off the character lets us know what others are missing, what he’s hoping to get out of her company.
If you know “Ikiru,” you remember how all this plays out. And Ishiguro’s script hits not just the same notes as Kurosawa’s original screenplay, but the right ones.
It’d be wrong to see what’s happening here as hopeful, upbeat or life affirming, despite the twinkle Nighy can’t help but bring to any role.
But the warning is poignant as ever, just as surely as Dickens himself laid it out in “A Christmas Carol.” It’s never too early to take stock, and never too late to do something that will help others or at least brighten their day or lessen their burden. While you’re still “Living,” there’s always time.
Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and smoking.
Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Adrian Rawlins, Patsy Ferran, Barney Fishwick and Tom Burke.
Credits: Directed by Oliver Hermanus, scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film “Ikiru, scripted and directed by Akira Kurosawa. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:43
Movie Nation 