All-TIME 100 Movies

Ikiru

Everett

In any job, it’s so easy to say no. (Film reviewers know this as well as anyone.) This film is about the importance of saying yes: to life, to adventure, to human need. Ikiru, which means “to live,” is about Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo office chief whose stamp of disapproval falls on almost any project, regardless of merit. Gray and unemotional, he’s less a man than a stolid piece of furniture, a bureaucrat who might as well be a bureau. Then he learns he has stomach cancer, and takes stock of all he has left undone. Replaying It’s a Wonderful Life, but in reverse gear, the movie sends him on a journey through Tokyo’s nighttown to demonstrate that, no, his life as husband, father, worker didn’t make a difference. He might as well never have been born. Kurosawa makes Watanabe’s conversion, revival, resurrection as inspiring as it is pure. And Shimura, a superb actor, makes his character a plausible saint, who can find poetry in a simple song, or sitting on a playground swing.

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