Wow, back with Kirosawa again. Not that I am complaining, far from it, but I am just pleasantly surprised Akira Kurosawa has two slots on the Stacker list so close together. Oh, and there are others yet to come, but starting off with some from one of my favorite directors is a nice way to get started. Factor in as well that these are films I hadn’t seen before, largely since my Kurosawa experience was limited to samurai movies, it’s nice to see some of the director’s other work. Plus, I have actually heard plenty of good things about Ikiru, a title that apparently translate to “to live” and is based on a Tolstoy novella.
It is every bit as beautiful as I had heard.
The film opens with Kanji Watanabi (Takashi Shimura), a midlevel bureaucrat that has been working in the same job for 30 years and with a year to go to retirement. His job is dull and miserable, but flashbacks show his wife died many years earlier, leaving Watanabi to raise his young son alone. The son, along with his son’s wife, live in Watanabi’s house and seem more concerned about inheriting the old man’s pension than the old man’s general welfare. Such would make sense as Watanabi gets some bad news: he has stomach cancer and mere months to live. Watanabi was already going through life like a ghost, to the point that when he learns a former young employee referred to him as a “mummy,” he couldn’t really argue with that. With only a few months left to live, what will the old man end up doing?
He isn’t sure, and that’s the point of the film. He tries living it up with the local night life and then shadowing the aforementioned former employee, a young woman who left the government job to work in a toy factory and always seemed to be happy to be anywhere. He’s not looking for any sort of romance with the young woman, but he likewise can’t bring himself to tell his son about his diagnosis. He does eventually tell the woman–the news somewhat freaks her out given how he delivers it–but it does give him an idea, something he can do on the job, something that someone can do but the bureaucracy of the local government has always prevented. There’s a patch of ground in town, one where there are sewage issues, and the local mothers have been run in literal circles trying to get someone to approve filling the area in and maybe even building a playground for their kids there. Each office they go to tells them they need to go to another one until they get back to the one they started in.
Oddly enough, the extensive bureaucracy of the Japanese government was also held up as some sort of comedic commentary in 2016’s Shin Godzilla.
But to the point: Watanabi realizes he can do one thing, something for the children, and he can do it from his job: he approves the playground’s construction. Now, I expected this to lead to the end of the film where Watanabi sees the fruits of his labors, maybe sees some kids happily playing there, and then dies. I knew there was an image near the end of the film with Watanabi’s sitting on a swing in a snowstorm and then he would die, or at least the closing credits would roll with the implication that he would die soon afterwards.
That is not at all what happened. Instead, he dies off-screen with a little under an hour left, leading to his funeral where his co-workers and family try to figure out why he suddenly changed the way he did, with flashbacks showing that Watanabi, despite the fact he never loses the stoop of his shoulders and generally timid demeanor, was utterly fearless, going around and getting the go-ahead from everyone he needed to in order to finish the playground, including a local crime boss. He’s dying, though no one really knows that, and it makes him utterly fearless without ever actually looking fearless. It’s something no one understands until the report comes in from a local cop about how the old man was found singing a sad song on the swings one night while it was snowing.
It’s a moment that tells the other bureaucrats, maybe, why he did what he did, actually finding a way, after thirty years, to make a boring job worthwhile. It is essentially what these men–and they are all men–probably should be doing, but none of them had the courage to do so until one old man got a cancer diagnosis and had nothing left to lose, but at the same time, no one really cared enough about the old man to actually get to know him, including his son and whatever other relatives he had. In fact, it’s his son’s insistence that the old man would have told the son about the cancer if he knew about it that delays the other characters from realizing what happened with Watanabi. But with all that in mind, can these men go back to the office and actually serve the people and make life better for everyone as Watanabi finally did in his final months? They say they can, but…
But no, they can’t or won’t. It would seem that bureaucratic inertia is too much for anyone without a lethal diagnosis of some kind.
And that’s more or less the meaning here. In order to find some sort of happiness or fulfillment, the thing to do is to do something for others, and that requires courage to break out of a mold set up both by the people in the system and the system itself. The bureaucracy isn’t built to help people, but with some effort a determined person could make it happen, and that’s not something politicians or the anonymous drones working in the offices can bring themselves to do all that often if ever, even if it makes them look good in the end. For all that Watanabi managed to get some good work done before he died, he likewise had no real or permanent impact on his coworkers or the society as a whole.
But those children got a nice place to play, and having Watanbi’s efforts go unrecognized outside of his small circle of acquaintances, that somehow seems right. He didn’t do it for the recognition. He did it for a bunch of kids he never really met. That means a bit more, perhaps, than just finding personal fulfillment in a job and a life that otherwise defies such feelings.
NEXT: Well, after all that heavy stuff, how about some classic animated Disney? These lists always have at least one of those, so which one did Stacker use? 1940’s Pinocchio.
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