Kurosawa opens his story with a deliberate, low-key pacing, although at the end there is rage against the dying of the light. In a scene that never fails to shake me, Watanabe goes home and cries himself to sleep under his blanket, while the camera pans up to a commendation he was awarded after twenty-five years at his post.
It is not so bad that he must die. What is worse is that he has never lived. “I just can’t die—I don’t know what I’ve been living for all these years,” he says to the stranger in the bar. He never drinks, but now he is drinking: “This expensive sake is a protest against my life up to now.”
His leave of absence at the office continues, day after day. Finally a young woman who wants to resign tracks him down to get his stamp on her papers.
He asks her to spend the day with him, and they go to pachinko parlors and the movies. She tells him her nicknames for everyone in the office. His nickname is “the Mummy.” She is afraid she has offended him, but no: “I became a mummy for the sake of my son, but he doesn’t appreciate me.”
She encourages him to go see his son. But when he tries to tell him about his illness, the son cuts him off—insists on getting the property due him before the old man squanders it on women. Later, on a final outing with the young woman, he tells her about a time when he was young and thought he was drowning. He says, “My son’s far away somewhere—just as my parents were far away when I was drowning.”
The word Ikiru has been translated as “To Live,” and at some point on his long descent into despair, Mr. Watanabe determines to accomplish at least one worthwhile thing before he dies. He arrives at this decision in a restaurant, talking to the young woman while in a room behind them there is a celebration going on. As he leaves, girls in the other room sing “Happy Birthday” to a friend—but in a way they sing for Watanabe’s rebirth.
A group of women have been shuttled from one office to another, protesting against a pool of stagnant water in their neighborhood. Watanabe becomes a madman, personally escorting the case from one bureaucrat to another, determined to see that a children’s park is built on the wasteland before he dies. It all leads up to Watanabe’s final triumph, seen in one of the greatest closing shots in the cinema.
The scenes of his efforts do not come in chronological order, but as flashbacks from his funeral service. Watanabe’s family and associates gather to remember him, drinking too much and finally talking too much, trying to unravel the mystery of his death and the behavior that led up to it. And here we see the real heart of the movie, in the way one man’s effort to do the right thing can inspire, or confuse, or anger, or frustrate, those who see it only from the outside, through the lens of their own unexamined lives.
We who have followed Watanabe on his last journey are now brought forcibly back to the land of the living, to cynicism and gossip. Mentally, we urge the survivors to think differently, to arrive at our conclusions. And that is how Kurosawa achieves his final effect: He makes us not witnesses to Watanabe’s decision, but evangelists for it. I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently.
Kurosawa made it in 1952, when he was forty-two (and Shimura was only forty-seven). It came right after Rashomon (1951) and The Idiot (1952), which also starred Shimura. Ahead was his popular classic The Seven Samurai (1954) and other samurai films like The Hidden Fortress (1960), the film that inspired the characters R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. The film was not released internationally until 1960, maybe because it was thought “too Japanese,” but in fact it is universal.
I saw Ikiru first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for two and a half hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates’s statement, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”‘ Over the years I have seen Ikiru every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.
The King's Speech
R, 118 m., 2010
Colin Firth (Bertie), Geoffrey Rush (Lionel Logue), Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth), Guy Pearce (Edward VIII), Jennifer Ehle (Myrtle Logue), Derek Jacobi (Archbishop Cosmo Lang), Michael Gambon (George V), Timothy Spall (Winston Churchill), Anthony Andrews (Stanley Baldwin). Directed by Tom Hooper and produced by Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, and Gareth Unwin. Screenplay by David Seidler.
The King’s Speech tells the story of a man compelled to speak to the world with a stammer. It must be painful enough for one who stammers to speak to one other person. To face a radio microphone and know the British Empire is listening must be terrifying. At the time of the speech mentioned in the title, a quarter of the earth’s population was in the empire, and of course much of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia would be listening—and with particular attention, Germany.
The king was George VI. The year was 1939. Britain was entering into war with Germany. His listeners required firmness, clarity, and resolve, not stammers punctuated with tortured silences. This was a man who never wanted to be king. After the death of his father, the throne was to pass to his brother Edward. But Edward renounced the throne “in order to marry the woman I love,” and the duty fell to Prince Albert, who had struggled with his speech from an early age.
In The King’s Speech, director Tom Hooper opens on Albert (Colin Firth) attempting to open the British Empire Exhibition in 1925. Before a crowded arena and a radio audience, he seizes up in agony in efforts to make the words come right. His father, George V (Michael Gambon), has always considered “Bertie” superior to Edward (Guy Pearce), but mourns the introduction of radio and newsreels, which require a monarch to be seen and heard on public occasions.
At that 1925 speech, we see Albert’s wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), her face filled with sympathy. As it becomes clear that Edward’s obsession with Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) is incurable, she realizes her Bertie may face more public humiliation. He sees various speech therapists, one of whom tries the old marbles-in-the-mouth routine first recommended by Demosthenes. Nothing works, and then she seeks out a failed Australian actor named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who has set up a speech therapy practice.
Logue doesn’t realize at first who is consulting him. And one of the subjects of the film is Logue’s attitude toward royalty, which I suspect is not untypical of Australians; he suggests to Albert that they get on a first-name basis. Albert has been raised within the bell jar of the monarchy and objects to such treatment, not because he has an elevated opinion of himself, but because, well, it just isn’t done. But Logue realizes that if he is to become the king’s therapist, he must first become his friend.
If the British monarchy is good for nothing else, it’s superb at producing the subjects of films. The King’s Speech, rich in period detail and meticulous class distinctions, largely sidesteps the story that loomed over this whole period: Edward’s startling decision to give up the crown in order to marry a woman who was already divorced three times. Indeed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (as they became) would occupy an inexplicable volume of attention for years, considering they had no significance after the duke’s abdication. The unsavory thing is that Wallis Simpson considered herself worthy of such a sacrifice from the man she allegedly loved. This film finds a more interesting story about better people; Americans, who aren’t always expert on British royalty, may not necessarily realize that Albert and his wife, Elizabeth, were the parents of Queen Elizabeth II. God knows what Edward might have fathered.