"Living," a Movie About Dying Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Is there a better short story in the world than Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych?  If there is, I never read it.  

When my favorite living writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote the screenplay for a retelling of Ivan Ilych, I very much wanted to see it. 

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

The beginning of the movie Living was wonderful. I could not think of a better way to portray the character of a middle manager in an endless bureaucracy than the character Rodney Williams. He shuffles paperwork at the head of a circle of desks where his half-dozen minions do the same.

When that complacent middle manager confronts mortality, his attempts at actually living life are charming failures.  

At the end of the movie, after Williams dies, the movie is even more deliciously perfect, portraying how the bureaucracy swallows the souls of those who fill in the space left in the hierarchy.  

Between every beginning and end is a middle. The middle left me vaguely unhappy. Then I talked to two of the most insightful people I know and they were of opposite minds about the main character's actions in the months before his death.  

Then I was more unhappy. Could both be right? 

One says, "Yes, Williams actions make sense. He tried to live life outside his work. Then he decided to do something good in the world he knew best." 

The other, a modern stoic, says, "He was selfish and avoided involvement for all of his life. Our habits define us. He would, like Ivan Ilych, simply become more self-involved when he received the terminal diagnosis."

In the middle of the movie, Williams decides to help three women build a playground in an area wrecked by bombing in World War II. The movie is set in London in 1953. Williams takes the folder from his "Hold" basket and navigates the paper through the labyrinth of approvals necessary to get the project underway. When another bureaucrat says he will look into the matter, Williams sits in the middle of the office and says he will wait as long as necessary.  

Williams wins. The playground is built. The community loves and honors him. But the world is unchanged. Watch the movie to see how deliciously the bureaucracy reasserts its inherent inertia.

If you do watch the movie, read the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. If I have any coherent views about the moment of death and the afterlife, I got them from this story and from The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S.Lewis.