Plot
Rodney Williams is a senior London County Council bureaucrat in 1953 London. He sits at his desk surrounded by piles of paperwork and seems uninspired. A group of women, led by Mrs. Smith, petitioned the council to redevelop a World War II bomb site into a children's playground. They are sent with their petition from department to department with a newer employee, Mr. Wakeling. Despite Wakeling's enthusiasm, he is stymied by an ossified and sclerotic bureaucracy at every step. The petition makes the usual circular rounds and ends back with Williams, who returns it to his pile of paperwork and makes clear to his colleagues his intention to take no further action.
When Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, he attempts unsuccessfully to tell his son, Michael, and daughter-in-law, Fiona. Williams then chooses to withdraw half of his life savings, purchase a lethal amount of sleeping medicine, and commit suicide in a seaside resort town. Finding himself unable to go through with it, he gives the sleeping medicine to Mr. Sutherland, an insomniac writer he meets in a café. Moved by Williams's story, Sutherland takes him for a night on the town, where Williams replaces his traditional bowler hat with a fedora after a prostitute steals his bowler hat. The pair go to bars, sing, drink heavily, and attend a striptease/burlesque show.
Returning to London but not to work, Williams runs into Miss Margaret Harris, a young former subordinate who took up a position at a Lyon's Corner House restaurant while he was away. Williams's nosy neighbour spots the pair having lunch at the high-end restaurant Fortnum's and tells Fiona, who demands Michael speak to his father about the potential scandal. Meanwhile, Williams attempts to tell Michael about his diagnosis, but neither finds themselves able to bring up what they need to talk about.
As Williams's health worsens, he attempts to spend more time with Harris, whose youthful vigour he envies and would like to regain before he dies. Realising the best way to spend his remaining time is to do some good, Williams rallies the various departments to approve the construction of the children's playground. During this time, through their mutual respect for Williams, Harris, and Wakeling, they have grown fond of each other and are seen taking walks and sitting in parks together.
Although he is able to push the process through by standing up to his colleagues and superiors, Williams dies shortly after construction is finished. At his funeral, well-attended by the people he has helped, Michael guesses that Williams had told Harris about his diagnosis but not him.
Inspired by Williams's actions, his former colleagues pledged to uphold his example and become advocates for positive change but soon reverted to their old bureaucratic ways. Wakeling, who joined the office shortly before Williams's diagnosis, reads a letter left for him by Williams instructing him to remember the playground when he gets discouraged. Visiting the playground, Wakeling meets a police officer who tells him that he saw Williams there shortly before he died, rocking in the swing in the snow and singing the Scottish folk song "The Rowan Tree." The constable feels guilty that he let Williams sit in the cold in his condition. Wakeling consoles the officer, saying Rodney Williams was probably happier in that moment than he had been for a long time.
