Departures

Offering a gentle diversion from the loud bangs and clangs of the current summer blockbuster onslaught, the small Japanese drama Departures finally hits local theatres more than three months after the movie won the Foreign Language Oscar at the 81st Academy Awards. Its arrival at this point in the movie calendar allows for a unique opportunity to leave behind all of the killer robots and angry superheroes that have dominated the cinemas as of late. But for all of the movie's welcome delights, Departures still stumbles in its second half due to a lack of focus and an overstuffed plot.

Written by Kundo Koyama and directed by Yojiro Takita, Departures is about a man named Daigo (beautifully portrayed by Masahiro Motoki), who leaves behind his dreams of being a cellist in Tokyo and moves back to the small town where he spent his youth. Once there, he quickly stumbles into a job that he mistakenly assumes has something to do with the travel industry. Instead, he learns that he has signed on to become a 'coffin agent,' which means that Daigo will perform special ceremonies to prepare corpses for cremation.

At first, he is disgusted by what the job requires, but over time, he forms a bond with his boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki, who brings a lot of personality to a standard mentor role) and begins to find the passion in his own life by embracing the eternity of death. With such grim subject matter coating the celluloid, one might expect that Departures is an entirely serious movie. But one of the movie's initial surprises is that Koyama and Takita have chosen to approach the story with a significant sense of humour.

There are several funny moments that help break the tension, including a wonderful scene in which Daigo becomes an unwitting participant in an instructional video that covers the finer details of the funeral ceremonies. The mixture of light comedy and heavy drama makes for a potent mix in the movie's lovely first half, but the narrative begins to lose momentum in the final hour as the comedy is sacrificed in favour of gooey sentimentality.

Departures deals with big themes of life and death, family and friendship on a small scale, which works wonders in the earlier moments of the movie. But a story of such initially meticulous simplicity benefits from brevity and that is a quality that Departures is sorely missing. As the story begins to drag on at a glacial pace, it becomes clear that Koyama and Takita feel the need to tie up every single plot thread that has been so much as hinted at during the movie's 130 minute running time.

By the time the movie reaches its obvious conclusion, the sap is flowing like a river and a once-intriguing rock motif officially overstays its welcome. Gone is the humour and engaging tone that made the movie so promising in the beginning. Now it is weakly approaching the finish line, weighed down by the considerable narrative fat that could so easily have been trimmed from the movie's second half.

Fortunately, the issues I have with the lack of clarity and focus are problems that hold the movie back from being truly great, instead of problems that force the movie to be altogether bad. Departures is still a movie worth seeing, both for the delectable cinematography by Takeshi Hamada and the wonderful acting by Motoki, Yamazaki, and Ryoko Hirsute (who plays Daigo's loving wife Mika). And because the story often touches upon Daigo's relationship with his cello, the movie also features some soothing classical music that soars with dramatic importance.

The good clearly trumps the bad in the case of Departures and so we are treated to an enjoyable movie that works well enough in its current form, even if the possibility of so much more is buried deep within the frames. As a window into another culture and as a distraction from the noise and flashy effects of the summer blockbusters, Departures is a commendable movie that deserves attention for everything it does right. I cannot help but yearn for more in a movie that comes so close to achieving greatness, but this remains a satisfying tale of life and death, as told, however temporarily, with humour and grace.