Then Oswalt undercut his praise of Ikiru by comparing its impact to Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life and Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day. Having praised all three of these films on this blog, I now find it necessary to qualify my praise.
Koreeda's film cleverly actualizes a beautiful concept: when we die each of us is given a week to choose from among our lifetime's memories the one in which we will spend eternity. I enjoyed the film and found its concept inspiring. It makes one think about one's memories and, in the process, better understand what happiness is. But it didn't make me rethink my life.
Groundhog Day transcends its light comedy structure, but does it so deceptively and gently that some people have spilled a lot of ink trying to give it metaphysical dimensions that it simply doesn't have. Its implications about the proper way to conduct one's life are happily limited to the narrow confines of one person's change of heart. But the alterations he decides to make are only reached after what must have been hundreds of iterations of a single day - February 2nd - in his life, with an exhaustive sequence of trial and error. The errors are what makes the movie funny - it is a nightmare Comedy of Errors. The hero, Phil Connors, finally "rethinks" his life, but only after he is forced to. He had to find a way to break the endless repetition and breaking the spell is only achieved once he has figured out that being kind and generous are better than being mean and selfish. I was entertained by the movie, uplifted even. But it didn't make me rethink my life. I didn't even rethink my evening.
Ikiru's great lesson of one man, Watanabe, one mediocre bureaucrat, making a difference, even a tiny one, in the small corner of the world he lives in, is reached at the cost of his life. If he hadn't been diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer, and realized that he was quickly running out of time, he would never have awakened from his deep moral slumber.
Kurosawa's film doesn't begin with a what if? He shows us a world, one resembling ours in its minutiae, but also in its broader implications. One day something feels different in Watanabe's gut, so he goes to his doctor. In the waiting room he meets another man who explains to him the symptoms of stomach cancer. Watanabe recognizes each symptom as identical to those he is experiencing. The man also tells him that, even if he has stomach cancer, the doctor won't tell him because the news would so discourage him that he would lose his will to live. So the customary practice among doctors at that time in Japan was to keep the awful truth from a patient. Instead, so the man says to Watanabe, the doctor will tell him he has a mild ulcer, no need to operate, and he can eat whatever he likes as long as it's digestible. If the doctor tells him this, it's certainly stomach cancer and he has less than a year to live.
Watanabe is examined and x-rays are taken and the doctor knows that it is, indeed, stomach cancer. But he tells Watanabe almost verbatim what the man in the waiting room said he would tell him if it was cancer. Watanabe is so shaken by the news - by the lie that discloses the truth - that he is almost run over by a truck in the street.
Kurosawa doesn't make Watanabe's redemption easy. Patton Oswalt said that once he knows he's dying he goes through "the seven stages" - despite there being only five. Actually, the only stage Watanabe experiences is that of cutting loose, which leads him nowhere except the inevitable return to sober fact of his impending death. A girl who once worked in his office shows him the way. She got another job in a factory making mechanical children's toys. The hours are long and the pay is inadequate, but when she thinks of all the children made happy by her toys she feels that her labors are not in vain. Then and there Watanabe knows what to do with the rest of his days.
Art is exalting. This is a subject that cries out for greater scrutiny, because it's too often a bone of contention between what's regarded as art and another thing called (somewhat contemptuously) entertainment. My argument against such a distinction is simple: art is the ultimate entertainment. It isn't so simple as people want you to think it is. Stephen King is not more entertaining than Dostoevsky, he's just a lot smoother going down. More people prefer Budweiser to craft beer. And few people are outfitted for the state of exaltation in which In Search of Lost Time leaves a reader.
When it comes to movies, which is considered a mass art, works that offer the same intensity of aesthetic excitement as a literary masterwork are extremely rare.
Writing about a different Kurosawa film - Red Beard - in 1967, Vernon Young defined Kurosawa's peculiar power over the viewer:
Red Beard is an overpowering experience. I recognize that fewer people all the time go to films wishing to be overpowered, Soon I'll have nobody to talk to....
Though writing about a film Kurosawa made 13 years after Ikiru, Young could easily have been commenting on Ikiru (and I'll let Young have the last word):
Kurosawa's art is principally the sum of his conviction. By now we can take for granted that he knows how to achieve the intensity at which he is aiming - esthetic distance is not his ideal - and where to place the viewer whom he hopes to subjugate. I was subjugated by this film. A detached appraisal of it, two months after the event, is something I am unable to deliver.
Because, in truth, I felt myself being submerged during the running time of Red Beard, I tried desperately to keep my critical distance, but I was unequal to the resolve. I wanted to resist the nagging logic and the driving agony of the film, to quarrel with it, become bored by it, condescend toward it - just as one does when assailed by life itself. And after every bout of fidgeting, sighing, and protesting under my breath, after every obstinate refusal to yield my sentiments any further. I was forced to give in and to return (fascinated) to the fray, to the importunate suffering, the hopelessness, the pity, and the stench.
I suspect that the normal strategy of the filmgoer who finds himself at the mercy of an emotion too painful to bear is to retreat beyond the peripheries of compassion or anger. By what means he manages to do this, I don't know. I don't think I really want to know.
I knew that for some months any film that aimed at less would seem unworthy of my attendance.... Suffering is an absolute value, not to be impugned by democratic hedonism nor bewailed by accusing at God in hiding. Kurosawa's best films, and this is one of them, do what serious art has always done when engaged with the human condition. They challenge us to live authentically.
(Vernon Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp 302-304.)
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