"Life Is Brief" b/w "You *Can* Fight City Hall": Kurosawa's Ikiru

In "The Royal Tenenbaums", Gene Hackman's title character is given (or says he's been given) six months to live. He takes this tragedy and turns it into an opportunity to get to know his kids again, and renew affections with his wife. It's a powerful setup, made only slightly less compelling by the fact that the whole thing is a ruse.

In "Citizen Kane", Orson Welles' title character dies in the first minute. His survivors take this tragedy and turn it into an opportunity to tell the world about the man they knew, the man they loved, and the man they feared. It's a powerful setup, made only slightly less compelling by the fact that the impetus for it is a MacGuffin.

In "Ikiru" ("To Live"), Akira Kurosawa's film about a Section Chief in the Public Affairs division of a Tokyo City Hall bound tightly by red tape, the main character has been given no more than six months to live. This news jolts him into realizing that his whole life has passed him by, without him every actually living it. It uses this conceit to deliver a film that can be divided easily into two distinct sides: the A-side is a "Royal Tenenbaums"-style Hail Mary pass, as our hero tries to finally live his life even in its dying moments; the B-side is a "Citizen Kane"-style remembrance of his life, as told by those who knew him best. Or, at least, thought they did. It all coalesces into a startling single whole that becomes one of the Master's greatest films, and most compelling stories.

From the first shot we see that this is not your father's Akira Kurosawa movie (that is if your father happens to be Toshirô Mifune). Instead of dusty vistas, suitable for samurai warfare or the pillaging of peasant villages, we are treated to an X-ray of a stomach. A stomach riddled with cancer. Modernity intrudes on the action in the form of medical science, and it becomes clear that this is not feudal Japan we are talking about, but the post-war Japan of the 1950s. It's a Japan rife with bureaucracy; the kind of place where doing "nothing at all" is the best way for a man to keep his position secure. Don't rock the yakatabune, and the yakatabune won't rock you, goes the underlying message.

Firmly ensconced in this life is Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), our doomed protagonist. It is his stomach that we've seen inside, giving us the benefit of a little dramatic irony: we know that he is not long for this world before he does. When we first see the man behind the stomach, in a nifty dissolve shot out of the X-ray, he is hunched over a pile of paperwork, stamping here and signing there, full on in the knowledge that no matter what he does the pile won't get any smaller. For further proof, Kurosawa and Co. have surrounded his desk with ominous mountains of documents. They enclose Watanabe, and always threaten to tumble over onto him in an avalanche of paperwork. Much of the film's look is oppressive, in this very same way; everything is crowded and claustrophobic to the point where privacy is not only not an option, it's an impossibility.

Kurosawa's visual and narrative styles, always working in conjunction with each other, are no less wonderful here than they are in any of his other masterpieces. He composes many shots from the point of view of a character observing Watanabe, just as the audience is asked to do throughout. He includes an intense flashback montage that tracks the relationship of Watanabe and his son (grieving at the funeral of Mrs. Watanabe, showing pride and disappointment at one of the boy's baseball games, sending the boy off to war, etc.) that will have any self-respecting modern male contemplating the cats in the cradle and/or silver spoons.

The story, though unconventionally told, is perfectly structured. The first part -- the "Life is Brief" section, punctuated by a song sung by Watanabe containing that theme as part of its lyric -- ends with Watanabe at a restaurant. Across the hall, a birthday party is taking place. Watanabe, in a moment of despair, suddenly realizes a way to make his life meaningful, purposeful, worth living. He rushes out of the restaurant, as the strains of 'Happy Birthday' can be heard all around him. When he returns to the office, the song is repeated on the soundtrack, this time by a lone wailing violin. Cut to five months later, and the narrator informs us that Watanabe is dead. The effect this has should be mournful, for we don't yet know if Watanabe's plan has been successful. But the impression left by the song, which traditionally welcomes a new life into the world, combined with Watanabe's own spiritual rebirth, gives it an uplifting feel. There are grand possibilities in this world, it seems to be saying, and it's never too late to start on your own.

In the end, we're left with the film's final, justifiably-praised image: Watanabe, sitting alone on a swing, seemingly unaware of the snow that's lightly covering him, beaming from ear to ear that he's finally accomplished something with his life. For a film that tries desperately to avoid melodrama and artifice, it's an emotionally arresting shot that honestly plays on the heartstrings.

Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe with a hunched-over gait, bugged-out eyes, a raspy whisper of a voice, and a lot of humanity. A veteran of twenty Kurosawa movies (most notably -- and most linkably -- he played the calm leader in "The Seven Samurai", and the Woodcutter in "Rashomon"), Shimura moves slowly, shows the physical pain of the character, and makes striking the unsaid emotional pain as well. His slow growth, from an invisible cog in a much larger machine to a man worth remembering, is subtle, intense, and always satisfying. Though often lost in the shadow cast by his director's more celebrated actor-muse, Mifune, Shimura shows that you don't have to be gruff and feral to succeed as the focal point of a Kurosawa film.

A large group of Kurosawa regulars surrounds Shimura (it's a group that includes 5 of the "Seven Samurai", in fact). Standing out from the crowd are Yûnosuke Itô, who charmingly plays a second-rate novelist, interested in the poetic nature of Watanabe's real-life predicament, and Miki Odagiri, an underling in the Public Affairs office whose zest for life Watanabe finds infectious.

At 143 minutes, "Ikiru" at times feels overlong. Many scenes could have been cut, and much of the dialogue goes on at length, including Watanabe's annoying habit of punctuating every speech with infinite tangents ("In other words…" he's prone to saying, before marching off down another path of thought). But, in hindsight, the length is necessary. It gives the film an epic quality, even though it's ostensibly an intimate story about one man. The length, and the time it allows the viewer for contemplation, gives weight to the power of one man's life, and thus humanity in general. The old parlour question, "What would you do if you had only six months to live?", which is verbalized by a doctor after giving Watanabe the bad news, becomes poignant, and relevant, and supremely important. Watanabe has his answer, though he waited until it was almost too late to find it. Let that serve as "Ikiru's" greatest message.