A New Hat is a Good Start.

A life unexamined, and all that mumbo jumbo.

If you’re on the brink of examining, I mean really examining your life, your job, your relationships or your place in the world, I expect that Ikiru (1952) is a harrowing journey. Time certainly hasn’t softened it. This doesn’t seem like the kind of life-loving animal that could have hung in theatres in the same years as Leave It To Beaver and Singin’ In The Rain. And while the Criterion DVD seems a little rough and aged at times, the film itself doesn’t seem anything like a 50-year (plus!) document. It’s a sharp and intricate narrative that puts some pretty universal (and always relevant) philosophy up front. Kurosawa’s appeal is immediately evident.

Ikiru isn’t really what I’d regard as a famous movie, so indulge me for a minute while I share what it’s about. Such a simple story. A life-long (and completely anesthetized) bureaucrat named Watanabe learns indirectly that he is dying of stomach cancer. His oncoming death shakes him out of complacency and forces him to confront the fact that life has completely passed him by. He spends the last weeks of his life chasing life itself, asking the big questions, searching for some meaning that will help justify his time on the planet. The big twist? He actually finds both meaning and purpose, and more surprisingly, the answer is overwhelming satisfying.

The film is a very complex experience. Like the big questions in life, the movie flips and flops, drawing the audience close enough to share private moments and still pushing them far enough back so that the film is never sentimental. There are scenes that are searingly intimate, as inclusive and tender as anything I’ve seen on film. Watanabe’s private moments in his bedroom, crying himself to sleep under his blanket, are simply painful to experience. There’s a voyeuristic quality to the moments he spends alone, as though it’s not quite fair to be watching this man struggle with this terrible burden for our entertainment. But at the same time, the experience of Ikiru is often very distancing. The main character, despite the private sequences, remains a cipher to some extent, with a tremendous amount of back-story left untold. The film makes huge jumps in time and travels back on itself to fill gaps in the narrative. Case in point: the last 50-minutes of the film are primarily composed of talking heads – worse than talking head: bureaucrats – discussing Watanabe’s days and trying to solve the mystery of what how he spent them. There’s not a single sympathetic character among them and believe me when I saw that they talk and talk and talk. The viewer is forced to piece together the resolution of the story in much the same way. I realize that this sounds like a frustrating experience, but there is such a wonderful payoff, maybe one of the best of the Monday line-up so far, that the experience never sags.

The movie also unfolds a lot like a good novel, driven by interior forces and unfolding at a pace that scarcely seems suited to the screen. There are long shots that would never hang onto a screen today. There is a shot of Watanabe waiting in a chair that must last longer than a minute. Many of scenes play as long takes, unbroken by close-ups or any other edits. The commentary on the Criterion DVD makes much out of the fact that Kurosawa was influenced heavily by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. It shows. The film sports that sort of pedigree.

For me, the film was a most unusual experience because I was in a strange place on Monday night. Coming off a weekend of weddings and old friends, I was filled to the lid with an unusual amount of vitality. Believe me that life certainly is not passing me by this month. So it is that Watanabe’s suffering washed over me to some extent. I like my job an awful lot. I love my family. I’m content with just about every piece of my life so reminding me that life is short doesn’t really drive me to make different choices. But this is why I can only imagine where this movie might take me otherwise. We’ve all been in that job or position where we wondered what it was all for. This movie puts that question into a leg-lock and twists hard. Watching Watanabe’s face and body language will make just about anyone question their own decisions.

And I think that it’s Watanabe’s face that inflicts the most pathos. That face, which carries both the terrible secret of his cancer and the burden of his empty lifestyle, is still haunting me days later. Upon watching the film a second time yesterday (it’s about the commentary – yo!), I was immediately struck by how much affection I had for Watanabe the very first time he showed up on screen. He has the widest eyes and most expressive eyes I’ve seen since Bette Davis a few weeks ago - and astonishingly, he puts her to shame.

There are at least a half dozen sequences in Ikiru that make it a masterpiece. At least three of these are as good as anything you’ll see in a movie. And one of them is so moving and transcendent, that only the language and context of the film does it justice. Describing it is a waste of time.

Despite all of this, I’m not so sure about Kurosawa yet. I want to put that in writing because I’m almost certain that the feeling will change in time: one day I may laugh to re-read this. But of all the great cinema masters, Kurosawa is the one with whom I’m not yet comfortable. I mentioned in an earlier post how much I’ve come to adore Stanley Kubrick. Even those most off-putting and Kubrickian of devices are now familiar and endearing. Of all the masters I’ve seen so far, Kurosawa reminds me most of Kubrick. He certainly has a rhythm and a style of his own but ironically, he's probably more accessible. I look forward to seeing more Kurosawa films in the coming months and hopefully coming to terms with that style. But for now, I’m wrestling with it.

And on the subject of time, I have the strong suspicion that Ikiru is a film that I will want – and maybe need – to revisit in the decades to come. It has that kind of temperature. I certainly adored it this time around, but I have the very certain sense that in a decade or more there will be a lot more layers revealed to me. Certainly the theme of living life while you can is quickly forgotten and worth revisiting from year to year. This probably makes Ikiru sound a lot more preachy and didactic than it is; but the fact is there are just some movies that cut deeper and tease harder at the underlying and larger questions.

I’m glad to have Ikiru as such a touchstone.