Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Frances McDormand   Director: Sarah Polley   Screenplay: Sarah Polley   Cast: Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett, Liv McNeil, August Winter, Kira Guloien, Shayla Brown, Emily Mitchell and Vivien Endicott-Douglas   Distributor: United Artists/Orion

Grade: B+

Debate is the essence of Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’s award-winning 2018 novel, which in turn was based on an actual incident that rocked an isolated Mennonite community, Manitoba Colony, in eastern Bolivia between 2009 and 2011.  Seven men were charged with raping numerous women in the group, many of them legally minors, after drugging them, and then ascribing the attacks to delusions or demonic spirits; they were convicted of the crime and sentenced to long prison terms. 

Toews transposed the event to a fictional community, and Polley leaves its name and location unspoken.  While the film alludes to the sexual violence in flashback, moreover, its focus is on the deliberations among the community’s women while all the men are away for two days seeing to those who have been arrested and detained.  Brought up in the belief that disobedience to patriarchal authority means excommunication and damnation, they must decide on one of three options: to stay and accept things as they are, to stay but fight for change, or to leave entirely.  Since a vote of all has proven inconclusive, with a tie between the second and third proposals, a small council of three families has been selected to decide the issue.

Most of the conversation is limited to a hayloft where the representatives have assembled to discuss the matter and determine course of action.  There are three older woman and their families: Janz (Frances McDormand), whose scarred face indicates abuse, with her daughter Helena (Shayla Brown); Agata (Judith Ivey), with her grown daughters, pregnant Ona (Rooney Mara) and Salome (Claire Foy), who has already shown her independent streak by carrying her ill daughter Miep (Emily Mitchell) to a mobile clinic for treatment; and Greta (Sheila McCarthy), whose older daughter Mariche (Jesse Buckley) has also suffered abuse and whose younger daughter Mejal (Michelle McLeod) suffers from panic attacks.  Greta’s granddaughter Nietje (Liv McNeil), whose mother is dead, is the best friend of Marische’s daughter Autje (Kate Hallett).  Since Janz argues that no changes should occur and departs the deliberations with Helena, her departure leaves the remaining eight women and girls to decide. 

There are two other figures of note.  One is the binary Melvin (August Winter), who quietly shuttles back and forth between the representatives and the rest of the community, the other women, girls and boys still on the property; and August Epp (Ben Wishaw), the son of a former member excommunicated for her rebellious thought who was educated on the outside and has returned to serve as a teacher to the boys.  He’s been asked to record the deliberations since the women have never been taught to read and write.  He’s also clearly devoted to Ona, whom he’s loved since childhood. Autje, however, serves as the film’s narrator, bookending the conversation with future remarks to Ona’s now-born child.

Autje’s narration, accompanied by brief flashes, recount how an attacker was discovered and attacked by Mariche with a scythe before his arrest with the others.  Now Mariche expresses fury at the men’s violations, as does Salome, while traumatized Mejal also demands action.  Ona, however, calmly suggests using the occasion to envisage the creation of a new order, to which the others respond with amazed antagonism.  Like her Greta and Agata also take measured positions, referring to the necessity of faith and forgiveness, though not a forgiveness that absolves the wrongdoers.  Questions arise about whether to take the boys with them if they decide to leave, considering how their attitudes might already have been shaped by their fathers.  That’s one of few occasions when August is asked his opinion, which Wishaw delivers with the muted grace he exhibits throughout, including in his awkward approaches to Ona.

He’s part of an estimable ensemble, which Polley directs with remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of the various women’s observations, making room for occasional shafts of humor within the overall serious tone (including an explosion of interest when a census-taker shows up, his car blaring a pop song) and not neglecting the religious underpinnings to even the most enraged of the disputants’ outbursts.  Everyone contributes splendidly to the group effort, and though Mara, Foy and Buckley will attract the most attention with their very different performances—the last two for their ferocity, the first for her beatific, though hardly reticent, mien—Ivey and McCarthy act as oases of quiet, homespun wisdom and sad regret (McDormand, on the other hand, does little but embody flinty resistance to change), while McLeod offers a poignant portrait of the damage the men’s brutality has caused, and Hallett and McNeil provide a taste of the juvenile rambunctiousness that still prevails amid the disruption.

In fact, when Nietje blurts out “This is very, very boring” at one point, some viewers may be inclined to agree, for despite the efforts of Polley, cinematographer Luc Montpellier and editors Christopher Donaldson and Roslyn Jalloo to keep things from feeling static through cuts and roving camera movement, much of “Working Talking” is just what the title indicates—a lengthy discourse in which points theological, philosophical and sociological are presented by an assembly of remarkably articulate women like paragraphs in a thesis about how to confront patriarchal oppression, something that could work equally as well on stage as on the screen.  (One can compare it in that respect to a film like “Twelve Angry Men,” though there Reginald Rose and Sidney Lumet ratcheted up the escalating tension to a far greater degree.)  A sense of urgency does arise in the last reel, as the return of one man, reported on rather than shown, requires the women to reach their decisions and implement them quickly, but even here a sense of understatement prevails.  The same is true of the film’s visuals—Peter Cosco’s spare production design and Montpellier’s desaturated color palette, which results in images like painterly sketches—and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s morosely moaning score.                         

Yet while some will criticize Polley’s film as claustrophobic and too dramatically restrained, it uses the situation Toews created to stimulating, thought-provoking effect.  And it’s an example of superb ensemble acting.

Producers: Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen   Director: Oliver Hermanus  Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro   Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke, Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris, Hubert Burton, Zoe Boyle, Barney Fishwick, Patsy Ferran, Jessica Flood, Nicola McAuliffe, Michael Cochrane and Lia Williams   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B+

It’s always dangerous to remake a classic film, but this English-language revisiting of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” is largely an admirable effort, due not so much to Oliver Hermanus’ careful direction or the respectful screenplay by noted novelist Kazuo Ishiguro as to the impeccable lead performance of Bill Nighy.  He’s long been an actor whose mere presence could lift even mediocre material, and this is one of his finest accomplishments, a fastidiously underplayed turn that might remind you a bit of Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner.

Nighy’s emotionless Mr. Williams is like the walking dead—one of his co-workers has nicknamed him Mr. Zombie—even before he receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer.  He’s a government bureaucrat heading an office in the Department of Public Works in the early 1950s, where he and his sedentary staff spend most of their time pushing papers from one box on their desks to another, accomplishing next to nothing.  A widower who lives with his distant son Michael (Barney Fishwick) and daughter-in-law Fiona (Patsy Ferran), who’s unhappy with the arrangement, he follows the same routine every day, commuting to the office in his well-pressed suit, his polished shoes and his bowler hat, umbrella always to hand, filling the working hours with little talk or human connection, and returning home to a bleakly uneventful evening.  Of his underlings, Rusbridger (Hubert Burton), Middleton (Adrian Rawlins) and Hart (Oliver Chris) are as hidebound as he; only newcomer Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp) wants to accomplish something—anything—while free-spirited Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), who has coined Williams’ unflattering nickname, is looking for a job elsewhere.

After receiving the bad news about his health, Williams is unable to tell his son of his condition, instead confounding his staff by simply not coming in to work.  Instead, contemplating suicide, he escapes to a shabby seaside resort, where he abruptly confides his plan to a chatty local rake named Sutherland (Tom Burke), who insists on taking him out for a night on the town, or at least its low-rent fringes.  Williams forlornly gives himself over to the supposed pleasures of the place, even mournfully singing a song in a club as memories overtake him, but after his return to London his intention is to resume his ordinary life as best he can.

At least that’s the case until he encounters Miss Harris, who has in fact left the office to take a job as a waitress in hopes of becoming a tea restaurant manager, and impetuously invites her to lunch and a movie—“I Was a Male Bride” with Cary Grant, no less.  Her bubbly personality convinces him to accomplish one real project in his last days—the construction of a small playground promoted by a quartet of determined ladies (Zoe Boyle, Lia Williams, Jessica Flood and Nicola MaAuliffe), which he pushes forward with dedication that floors his staff, his departmental colleagues and the minister (Michael Cochrane) that oversees them all.

“Living” is tighter than “Ikiru,” coming in as edited by Chris Wyatt at under two hours where Kurosawa’s take was thirty minutes longer, even though it adds a romantic subplot for Harris and Wakeling and is faithful to its source in virtually every particular, down to the famous shot of the protagonist on a playground swing and the ironic twist involving his subordinates’ vow to follow his late-in-life example of commitment to doing good.  It mimics the look and feel of films from the fifties as well, from the retro titles through the Helen Scott’s colorful production design, Sandy Powell’s on-point costumes, and Jamie D. Ramsay’s unfussy but elegant cinematography. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score fits the mold, too.

The cast is overall fine, with Sharp and Wood nicely contrasted to the officious trio of Burton, Rawlins and Chris and the far from familial Fishwick and Ferran.  Burke is charismatic even if Sutherland isn’t the most credible character in the world.

But it’s Nighy who sells what might, after all, have easily descended into sentimental mawkishness.  Suppressing his frequent penchant for flamboyant eccentricity, he calculates every tic, pause and nervous smile for optimal effect, exuding Williams’ faded gentility as well as his determined energy in the face of escalating pain.

Thanks to Nighy’s flawlessly gauged performance, the gamble of reimagining Kurosawa’s film in British terms turns out handsomely in all respects.