IKIRU
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: One of the best dramas ever made, a movie about life and death, and the Big Question of both of them.
"This is an X-ray of the stomach of the man in this movie," intones a voice at the start of Akira Kurosawa's IKIRU, one of the best dramas ever made. The voice is flat, mechanical, maybe even a little officious. "He has cancer. He's dying, but he doesn't know it yet. As a matter of fact, he's hardly even aware that he's alive."
The man in question is a middle-level Tokyo-city bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe, and is played by one of the most remarkable actors in the Japanese studio system aside from Toshiro Mifune: Takashi Shimura. If you've seen other Kurosawa movies, you've almost certainly seen him at some point, playing gentle, almost grandfatherly types. In IKIRU he manages to make himself look anonymous, Everyman-ish, and it works. From the minute we see him, we simply accept him as being the dull little man we need to see him as. His performance is so understated, it works subliminally.
Watanabe, as the introduction makes plain, has stomach cancer, and he learns the truth of his condition in a scene of almost unbelievable emotional intensity. While waiting for the doctor, he is confronted by another patient, who describes in sarcastic and cynical language just how the cancer patients get dealt with. He describes and anticipates all of Watanabe's symptoms dead-on. The camera has the other patient in the background, almost talking to himself, with Shimura almost up against the lens -- staring and staring, like a rabbit trapped in a car's headlights before it's crushed.
Watanabe does not handle the news well: his first impulse is to get drunk, and he does this with a companion in a series of scenes that play like he's wandering through the circles of Hell. But as he sinks into his misery, we see more and more about how he's come to be like this. His son sees him as a cipher. His co-workers never saw him as a human being (his office nickname was "The Mummy"). And when a spirited younger co-worked quits and takes a far lower-paying job in a factory to simply stay sane and not die of boredom, he follows her in an almost puppyish attempt to perhaps acquire some of her energy.
Slowly, Watanabe puts together a plan to fight back against death, by pushing through a project to build a playground that has been systematically turned down by one arm of the city bureaucracy after another. He finds a purpose, and in that purpose reinvigorates himself long enough to see the job through. There is one scene, frightening in its power, where he has run afoul of a yakuza, and only smiles knowingly when the other man threatens him with a knife. He has already stared death down and won.
The movie's final stretch is unusually constructed: it takes place after Watanabe's death, at his wake. His do-nothing co-workers arrive, quarrel over what was going on in Watanabe's life when he died, learn the truth, and then pledge to change... but in an emotionally overwhelming conclusion, we find that nothing is ever that easy. Some people have found the ending unsatisfying, but on a second viewing of the movie, I realized it was the only ending that made sense. By having the rest of the office betray Watanabe's memory, we are invited to proselytize in their place.
IKIRU is a sad movie, but it earns every moment. It is not a "tear-jerker"; it doesn't attempt to manipulate us unfairly. It just presents us with a case of a man faced with a giant and unanswerable question: How should we live? More importantly, how should we live in the shadow of death? IKIRU confronts this question, certainly the largest and most difficult question any of us would have to wrestle with, and comes away with an answer -- not bromides, not placation, and not cant, but an exhortation. Roger Ebert has said that if there was ever any one movie that he felt could truly induce its viewers to make a change in their lives, this would be it, and I agree.
Akira Kurosawa seemed determined to make one movie in every genre before he died, and in IKIRU he made one of the most emotionally affecting and enduring dramas ever. This is a bold and direct movie about life as well as death, something that very few works of fiction are ever able to approach without descending into preachiness or sentiment.
Four our of four playgrounds.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://serdar.home.ml.org another worldly device...
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