Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1952, S)

If the initial reviews for films like Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck, and Niki Caro's North Country are any indication, it appears as if this year's Oscar race will be contested by a slate of left-friendly films with not-so-subtle political themes. I hope to see most, if not all, of these films, to glean whatever artistic value may be in them, but will probably be forced to hold back my gag reflex throughout most of them. Very few of our best modern filmmakers, perhaps with the exception of Mel Gibson, have expressed a conservative philosophy in their work (and to call The Passion a "conservative" film is stretching things).

There was a time, however, when directors made great films touching on politics that didn't always take the far-left tact. No film is more appropriate in this vein right now than Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, a classic we'd do well to watch again in these times of massive pork-barrel spending and Alaskan bridges to nowhere. Ikiru centers around Watanabe-san, a lifelong bureaucrat who finds himself stricken with a stomach cancer that will take his life in six months. Despite having been well compensated for his work, he becomes deeply depressed. He tries to drink it off with a personal Themistocles and throw himself into a relationship with a young coworker to make himself happy again, to no avail. Finally, inspired by the girl, he makes the best decision of his entire adult life by deciding to make a lasting contribution in his final months.

As with all of Kurosawa's films, Ikiru has the right look to it, from the office where Watanabe-san works (visually busy, with seemingly endless amounts of useless stuff stacked to the ceiling--an outward metaphor for how useless the office is in reality) to the red-light district of this unidentified Japanese city to the haunting yet reassuring shot of a dying Watanabe-san sitting on a swing in the park that was the greatest work of his life. The old African spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" came to mind as I watched Watanabe-san's mannerisms on the swing, and indeed, no film better illustrates how our work, no manner how seemingly menial, can be salvific.

I find Ikiru exciting for the same reasons I found Fellini's 8 1/2 frustrating--the outward resolution runs parallel to the inner struggle of the individual, not against it. We only get the solution to Watanabe-san's basic problems once he has come to greater self-awareness, not as a bone from a filmmaker too lazy to come up with anything else. It's also one of the most compelling protests against big-government bureacracy ever waged by a filmmaker, not merely in how it makes fun of the worthlessness of such entities (there is a virtuoso sequence showing a group of poor women literally getting the "run-around" by the local bureaucrats that makes the local DMV seem like an express lane at Piggly-Wiggly), but in how it positions the bureacracy as detrimental to our ability to do good for anyone (a stance, by the way, which the Catholic Church has held for years in the principle of subsidarity, so often ignored by those Catholics claiming to represent the Church's teaching on "social justice"). Kurosawa's message would have been doubly effective in a Japanese context where the anti-conformist streak of the "new" Watanabe-san would have been vigorously fought against (and is fought against in the film), but given the unprecedented growth in government size being pushed by both political parties today, this conservative was happy to be reminded why we fought against such policies in the first place. These elements combine to make Ikiru one of those precious few films that manage to both pull at our heartstrings effectively and pull them in a philosophically meaninful way.
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