I have only seen four of Akira Kurosawa's films and so I know that I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. I am probably far undereducated to speak on the man not having seen Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Dreams or Red Beard. I'm still excited to see those, and know that I will be proven wrong. However, one of the major problems with Ikiru is similar to a major problem with Rashomon, and is beginning to lead towards a hypothesis that I have been developing towards Kurosawa’s work. These films have been so influential that having been exposed to so many of their products and imitators, the original has become stale. The premise of Rashomon, of an event being told by several different viewpoints, has been used in One Night at McCool's, Courage Under Fire, an episode of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” TWO episodes of "The X-Files" (the vampire pizza boy episode, and "Jose Chung's ‘From Outer Space’" AKA the one with the smoking alien). Quite possibly every comedic or semi-comedic TV show has used the premise when they were desperate. The premise of Ikiru, a man given a death sentence rediscovers how precious life really is and decides to use it to its full extent, has been used in American Beauty, My Life, Joe Versus the Volcano, Bulworth, the Dabney Coleman film Short Time, an episode and then some of “ER,” and an episode of “The Simpsons.” This story is OLD OLD OLD OLD OLD!!!

Well, Ikiru may be one of the first to do it, or at least do it well enough and publicly enough that it's difficult to find out who did it first. In her collection "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Pauline Kael wrote an essay on seeing movies on television. She says that young people are growing up without a real sense of film history. They are seeing it all backwards and forwards, and aren't taking it in sequence. Yeah, but of course this is not a choice as much as it is a fact. Joe Versus the Volcano and Short Time are some of my earliest memories of film as a kid. (I always wondered about those people who said that the first film that they ever saw in the theater was The Muppet Movie or Star Wars. My first was Adventures in Babysitting. Am I the only one being honest here or did everybody else's parents only take them to high-quality movies?) But anyway, the point is that I have long mastered the moral of this story, and a film needs to use it to say something unique. Joe Versus the Volcano used the premise to get its foot out the door. Short Time used it to get a slapstick comedy going. Bulworth was an awfully uneven movie, but its use of this plot was pretty clever; it used it to lead to bring out the "Liar Liar" payoffs. You know, what if politicians actually told it like it is? Of all the films that I mentioned, Ikiru most resembles American Beauty in that it plumbs the premise for its artistic possibilities more than its dramatic possibilities. The attempt is to deal with this material in a direct manner and ask, well, what is so great about life?

The “ER”/Dr. Green thread took this pretty straight, and was subtle about making some sort of overall statement about life. Given that we saw the series for years and knew the character well, and the show did such an admirable and skillful job, it is easy in any sense to regard the virtues of the episode as purely dramatic. The “Simpsons” episode was of course comedic. When Homer finds out that the poison blowfish didn't kill him, he says that he will become a new man and live each day to its fullest. In its last shot, the episode provides a dose of token cynicism standard for the series' early seasons: Homer sits on the couch eating and watching television. The episode is a graphic contrast to the piousness of Ikiru and American Beauty where these men actually do change. “The Simpsons” is a largely irreverent show, and concludes that Homer Simpson regards living as watching TV and eating. The promise of transformation is an absurd idea in the Simpsons universe, as Homer is unwilling or incapable of obtaining it. “The Simpsons” treats it with ruthless sarcasm. Although it does allow Marge to read a poem, the moment seems awfully self-conscious. If poignant, the absurdity of the poem's reading is not unexploited. Writing this, I realize that if the Ikiru plot had not been incorporated as a subplot in the ultra-nihilistic “Seinfeld” series, it really ought to have.

I mention this because the sincerity, openness and vulnerability of Ikiru are striking and at times sort of annoying. I talked last week about Glengarry Glen Ross, saying that it’s such a nihilistic and unsentimental film that you feel weak in not liking it. Ikiru is such a nakedly optimistic and sentimental film that you feel weak in liking it. Professional aching pussy Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" review makes you want to hug. The nihilism of “Seinfeld” or “The Simpsons” is much more comfortable to celebrate. Amy Taubin of The Village Voice calls Kurosawa's final film Madadayo "unabashedly personal and uncool.” That's exactly how I felt about Ikiru. Luckily, I have earned myself some ironic distance points by comparing it to “The Simpsons.”

Ikiru's hero is Kanji Watanabe. He works in a bureaucratic job that he hates, while the film's narrator informs us, "He just drifts through life. He is barely alive.” This is, of course, stolen almost word for word by American Beauty. When he discovers that he has stomach cancer, Watanabe becomes free to become fully alive. He does not know what this means exactly. The film is then, on a certain level, about his search to discover it. Watanabe meets a writer who takes him to check out all the sensual pleasures of the world. While he drinks and fearfully ogles the girlies, he does this out of protest to his life up until now. He is not satisfied with this hollow hedonism, but he seems to be internally aware that he should live his life in a manner that it makes a statement. A girl that he had worked with comes looking for him so he can stamp her resignation papers. They go out constantly and he spends several thousand yen on her. She begins to get sort of frightened at one point. Watanabe is constantly miserable and isn't much fun to be around. She points out that the two of them have very little to talk about. Watanabe admits that he doesn't know why he wants to be around her. He doesn't think that he is in love with her. It's not as much that he enjoys or needs her company, although in no small degree, he really does. Rather he wants to recapture her sense of life before he dies. She says that all she does is make toy bunny rabbits. She prides herself on being joy to all the children of Japan. Watanabe realizes that this is the key.

He goes back to the office and decides to aggressively clean up a wasteland and build a park over it. He is going to contribute to the joy of the world in the way that his woman friend does. He dies one snowy day in the park, and his funeral is filled with several men discussing his life. They eventually realize that Watanabe had lived his final days to make a statement. He hadn't rebelled against life itself, but through death has forced everyone else to examine their wasted lives. The film ends with everyone in the room deciding that they will go and do good. We all have a “pay it forward” moment. It is to the film's credit that this theme is consistent. American Beauty defines living through youth. (A necessary side note: Although Lester Burnham does not technically know that he is going to die, the film is told through post-death narration and plays exactly like the other works that I have mentioned.) As with Spielberg, who forced the film to get made, truth and beauty is defined by noble savagery of children. Like Watanabe, Lester Burnham is obsessed with a certain young woman, and the young woman becomes his catalyst for change. We feel a rush of joy in seeing Burnham finally getting back at his wife, working out to seduce the teenager, smoking pot, singing along to the Guess Who. But the filmmakers are far too frightened to have him go and actually fuck the girl. This would be the logical conclusion. Instead he grows a conscience, and sees her as a child again. It's far too late in the movie to redefine the meaning of life and it doesn't come to any particular useful results.

I feel that American Beauty could have Burnham and fuck the girl and still maintain its artistic and ethical integrity. Especially if they show young Ricky being arrested for the crime. It could become a sort of commentary and protest on self-living and the shroud of liberty provided by the sexual revolution. American Beauty exploits self-living for most of its running time, but fails to follow this idea to all of its implications. Compared to American Beauty, Ikiru reveals itself to be a far more holistic and thought-out work. None the less, the bulk of American Beauty is far more enjoyable. Ikiru's sense of altruism is often touching and sweet, but the film does not even attempt to approach or acknowledge the corniness. Unlike a film like Casablanca, the film is sincerely pious and sort of joyless. I know intellectually that American Beauty's content is stupid, but the film somehow manages to sell it. The film has a black magic; it's creepy and beautiful. I seriously feel that this is somebody's idea of what it means to be alive. It is something that Ikiru has difficulty duplicating. I think that it does have to do with that sincere righteous piousness. Kurosawa makes the nightclub scenes cinematic and exciting. But since Watanabe isn't into it, we aren't. Watanabe is a whiner. We agree with his lady friend; it's difficult to be around him and there comes a time where we don't have any more pity to give to him. We run completely out. The film becomes important and ceases to be pleasurable. Ikiru's philosophy is also somewhat of a problem. It sees life as more of a statement and not as a process, which I think you can argue isn't really living at all. At the very least, I'm not sure that an interest in destination is really cinematic.

Thematic concerns aside, I have some problems with the film's competence. Problems that I am sure I will take heat for but, nonetheless, have not discovered a way around. One large problem with the film is that all of its statements are spelled out for us. At times Ikiru seems to border on the anti-intellectual through its wholly articulate characters who define the film's thematic material for all but the most stupid in the audience. Ikiru is a talky picture, and there was so much in it that didn't really need to be said. The most offensive part of the film involves that group of men after the funeral relating stories about Watanabe's final days. This sequence seems to go on forever, pounding us with minute after minute of pure tedium. A character will describe a scene, and then Kurosawa shows us the scene. Yawn. After his conversation with the girl, when he knows what he is going to do, Kurasawa has a group singing "Happy Birthday to You," signifying the birth of Watanabe's new life. You'll be spitting teeth by the time Kurosawa's iron hand gets through with you. I suspect that I will want to see more of Kurasawa's samurai films. Rashomon and The Seven Samurai seemed to suffer from Kurosawa spellin' it out for us, but as they were genre films of a sort they were able to adopt a subtext. Ikiru is so character and dialogue-based that Kurosawa seems to be severely shortchanging its complexity through over-explanation.

I am not sure how to feel about Takashi Shimura's performance of Watanabe. Watanabe doesn't really seem to be a character that has many keys on the emotional piano. He is of course always frowning. He reminds me of the sad kangaroos in that octuplets episode of “The Simpsons.” This is grief taken to the nth degree. Our patience is tried, and there comes a point where it is difficult to relate to the character. For what it is, Shimura is in his own way quite remarkable. Perhaps the problem lies within the conception of the character, and less with the execution.

Ultimately, however, I found Ikiru to be a difficult film to really dislike. It is not the masterpiece that it has been heralded as. Indeed, I'm sort of stunned how hard critics have been buying it. I thought that perhaps I had missed something really deep, but no, the film is admired for the most superficial of its insights. Was there nobody to snicker at this movie? Nobody who had seen that episode of “The Simpsons” that I referred to? One critic, Daniel Sanders, refers to the film as life-affirming. Roger Ebert reads it according to Plato's dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, and appears to think that he is being intellectual. (Wasn't that Socrates?) The effects of the film on me were so modest that I have to wonder if the whole world has gone mad. It doesn't appear that I have missed anything. But failed art is interesting in itself, as the ambition is still there to be admired. It cannot be said that Ikiru is a timid or compromising film, unlike that unfortunate last bit of American Beauty. I have to admire that Akira Kurosawa made the film exactly the way that he wanted to make it. Watanabe half-sings a song from the ‘20s about how life is short and so we must love while we can. This is Kurosawa and Shimura at their most vulnerable. The scene is so pathetic that I could imagine it warranting snickers from cynical audience members. But in a way, it really is quite strangely moving. It's a moment that you can't get unless you burn all of your bridges.

Occasionally one will glimpse some really brilliant bits of business that don't fully integrate themselves into the fabric of the film, but manage to do their part. The film's first shot is of an x-ray of Watanabe's cancerous stomach, while a narrator tells us about his pathetic existence. This sequence seems to conjure up shades of Vladimir Nabokov's great novel Pnin. This absurdity is compounded some more as we watch a group of women try to get the area around their homes cleaned and are forced to go through several layers of red tape. Later, when faced with the possibility of stomach cancer, a man explains to Watanabe that when he has it his stool will come out black and he'll be able to eat whatever he wants but it will eventually come back up. It's a horrid, profoundly disturbing thought. The doctor tells Watanabe that he has a minor ulcer, and insists that he doesn't have cancer. The doctor later turns to his nurse and tells her that Watanabe has six months to live. I had hoped that the film would go on like this: angry but harshly absurd. The beginning tone peters out through the film, not fully going away. But Kurosawa's interests seem to be more prestigious than tonality and effects. He's interested in this material for what it says, and not as much for how it feels.

There is another image that I find particularly fascinating. Watanabe has a flashback. We see a wooden cart going down a road, and we seriously begin to wonder in what time period we are in. A windshield wiper then goes over the screen. We are at the funeral of Watanabe's wife. This shows Watanabe connecting death with the past and desperately trying to refute it. He doesn't seem to be completely in grievance at this point. We see him with his son, and he is emotionally and tightly holding on to him. Later we learn that he is unable to really communicate with his son and is seen as almost a nuisance. He says this to his lady friend: "Once when I was a child, I almost drowned. It's just like that feeling. Darkness everywhere, and nothing for me to hold onto, no matter how hard I try." He then talks about how he is unable to hold onto his son. The windshield shot suggests that he must learn to regard death as existing in his future, as a destination. He must not continue to live in the past, holding on to his son to get him through the emptiness of his life. This sequence on the whole is difficult and subtle, shaming that last, what was it, half hour?

Ikiru is heavy-handed sap, and I do not think that it is entirely effective or certainly one of the greatest films ever made. For the most part, I'm not sure that I found it incredibly challenging. I am more than sure that Kurosawa can do better then this. However I do have to admit that I would much rather see this than Patch Adams. For heavy-handed sap this is smarter, stranger and provides more diversions than the typical product.