63 Up (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by William Hepner

Produced by Ceri Aston, Sally Evans, Cort Kristensen, Claire Lewis, and Claire McBride; directed by Michael Apted; edited by Kim Horton. Color, 180 min., 2019. A BritBox release.

As the Western world was experiencing the surge of the 1960s counterculture, while the Beatles were cresting their international fame, a young Canadian director by the name of Paul Almond began filming a documentary for Granada Television, contributing to the World in Action series that was to last until 1998. A meteoric success probing the unmapped terrain of a diachronic documentary, Seven Up! emphasized that its premise was twofold: to test the veracity of the Jesuit maxim, “give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” and to give the viewership an oblique foretaste of England in the year 2000, when its subjects would be middle-aged. Continuing at regular intervals of seven years, the series has long since changed directors; assisting as a researcher on the first film, Michael Apted has since directed what has become a stirring series, often evoking what is profound by asking the simplest of questions and observing its human lives. Its latest installment, 63 Up, continues to evoke what is profound while examining the lives of subjects whose mortality has become apparent—one of the subjects has even died—and broaching political topics that have long been controversial.

Opening the documentary as the fiery boy from the East End of London, a taxi driver and father whose full-blooded and doggish resilience has long been a mainstay of the series, Tony has exhibited a consistency conforming to the initial Jesuit maxim, fulfilling it more than any other subject—he even acknowledges this himself after the director poses it as a question. But while Tony has exhibited this consistency, others are more difficult to classify. Has this initial premise remained largely intact, despite the vicissitudes of life and the changes of the subjects? Certain of them, such as Sue, have belied predictions of occupation and status; others, such as Suzy, have belied previous attitudes and blossomed in parenthood. The outlier of the series, ostensibly overturning the Jesuit maxim, Neil strayed from convention and was for a time homeless in Scotland, struggling with mental illness and eschewing society. But his erratic development was never as it seemed, and still detectable is the civic-mindedness of the child who wanted to become a coach driver. Although the maxim has remained pertinent to certain subjects verifying it in their gait and smile, the series has revealed humans as inconstant and fascinating; retaining the core of what they are, like the sediment of a stormy sea, many of the subjects of 63 Up have so transformed that no Jesuit could have predestined them as children. But no one utterly jettisons the child, however transformed—must one be a Jesuit to realize that?                  

Though 63 Up proceeds through its list of subjects with technical adroitness and fluency, so that its running time of over two hours seems pleasant and brisk, it possesses blemishes arising from its political content, which is at best half-hearted. A competent director of films such as Enigma (2001) and Unlocked (2017), Michael Apted has brought the Up Series considerable renown, breathing life into the earlier installments and serving as the familiar guide of his subjects in their maturity, prodding them where they should have been prodded, and on occasion being prodded himself when he oversteps propriety. The dexterity of his soft-spoken presence behind the camera, de-emphasizing his role in the exploration of his subjects, has been so effective as a means of presentation, contributing to a balance of form and content, that to imagine otherwise for the series would be blasphemous. 

But in this latest installment, his performance as the interviewer of the series, exhibiting the same dexterity to which he has long accustomed himself, entails certain attempts at political content, an effort at timeliness, clashing with the intimacy that is the sine qua non of the film. In a series examining subjects whose lives have been subsumed by the sociopolitical upheavals of the last fifty years, the political cannot be ignored; but in previous installments, what is political dovetails with the personal upheavals of the subjects. Tony, for instance, having bought a second home abroad, suffered from a decline of property value during the Great Recession, and in 63 Up, having consolidated and moved to the English countryside, he laments that the taxi industry has been upended by ridesharing companies such as Lyft and Uber. These biographical tidbits seamlessly flow from the train of thought impressing itself on the subject. But the director, mentioning topics such as Brexit, commits what feels like a non sequitur; the topic may be remotely pertinent, but its insertion is artificial and inauthentic. The same sensation surfaces when the director mentions Brexit to another subject and—the most blatant diversion of the film—when he mentions Donald Trump to Nick, who has been battling cancer and grieving the loss of his father. Non sequitur indeed. The Up Series had better cleave to what is excellent: intimate portrayals of its subjects and their lives.

Because these lives have lately grown old, 63 Up has the twinge of mortality imbuing the film with somberness and melancholy. In so long-lived a series—reconceiving what that adjective means for documentary cinema—the quiescence and death of the subjects cannot be avoided, and the resultant tone of the film, imbued with inescapable melancholy, is heavier than that of the previous installments. The liveliness and ambition, the spontaneity of youth, even the optimism and wonder—these have become scarce, making its tone both burdensome and revelatory. The recognition of death, the cessation of life, can be bitter and indigestible; but the series seems to reflect what we are, without looking away.  

The political content, however distracting, and the tone of melancholy, are slight blemishes of a film that remains outstanding because of its sincerity and dispassion, and because of two qualities that were less noticeable in previous installments: the editing and camerawork, and the gravity of the subjects, approaching seniority and evenfall.

Many shots of 63 Up display an artfulness associated not with documentary but with narrative, and their beauty reflects the gradual aesthetic refinement of the series. Certain long shots, be they by the seaside or before a house, are gently stirring: the series cinematographer, George Jesse Turner, describing his work on the latest installment, relates in an interview with The Guardian that “in France this time, with Neil, I happened to see him reading a book outside on his own and I knew we had to film it. There was no coming up to look over his shoulder. We stay distant. It was probably something Neil does every day, but they each need to have their particular images down the decades. We have to get these moments, these vignettes,” this moment being one of the many serendipitous long shots in a film offering unforgettable imagery. Adding to the long shots and the occasional close-up, the competent editing of the film unifies the presentation of its disparate lives: the theatrical running time of 180 minutes goes quickly, the transitions between subjects are seamless, and there is a notable shot in slow-motion—of children diving into a pool—dovetailing with the bookend shots without detracting from the aesthetic of the film. Harmonizing old and new, documentary and narrative, the editing has enhanced 63 Up.

The gravity of the subjects and the tone of the film are inextricable, the inevitable facts of aging and its effect on the series; but while the weightiness may be dispiriting, what accompanies it compensates: greater wisdom and frankness from the subjects, who have long been settling into themselves. Noting the repository of self-reflection innate to the series, Roger Ebert writes that “to look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time,” and one also notices that maturity nourishes this self-consciousness of living in time, that those who are mature feel the brevity and poignancy of a lifespan whose end approaches. The melancholy accompanies this self-consciousness, but in 63 Up it is as much an asset as a liability, not only dampening the tone of the latest installment in comparison with the others, but bestowing gravity and clarity, distilling what has been essential to the subjects, hinting at what they are and how they conceive themselves.

Diverging from a postmodern zeitgeist emphasizing cultural pluralism, the series has long since transformed from an exposé of British classism into a dispassionate portrayal of singular human lives. Its humble and tranquil authenticity attests to a guiding ethos that is implicit, pointing always to the sovereign dignity of the individual. It is thus a tonic rejecting American celebrity, the idolatry of appearances, and the postmodern conception of identity as collective, congenital, and static. If the human lives of the Up Series, experienced as the subtle and lengthy ripening of decades, have confirmed anything at all about the nature of human identity, it is that humans create themselves; that we are never what we appear to be; that as our identities manifest and ripen over the decades, they remain changeful and elusive. It is because of this elusive transformation of the self, the subtle lifelong patchwork of identity, that the Up Series has retained an unflagging critical acclaim. Featuring those beguiling human enigmas that can be inexhaustible, it never shortchanges the complexity of any subject; and when it cannot penetrate this complexity, it calmly observes.

Always articulate and often humbly profound, Neil has in prior installments suffered and strayed from those clear-cut trajectories to which many of the subjects have adhered. His personality, however altered by experiences of mental illness, is more searching and spiritual than those of his counterparts, and his answer to the question of the Jesuit maxim reflects it. Instead of mulling over the question posed by Michael Apted—whether he has conformed to the maxim, whether the child was in the man—Neil returns the question to the director, suggesting that only the viewers of the series could have discerned his development, his consistency as a human being. Following from this beguiling human enigma—that we cannot fully know ourselves, that we know ourselves only from within and thus struggle to attain any objectivity—the appeal to our impenetrability is echoed by Symon, who says in a moving statement that “it’s taken me virtually sixty years to understand who I am.”

Dovetailing with this appeal and expressing his profound understanding of the human condition, anticipating both Sigmund Freud and modern psychoanalysis, Friedrich Nietzsche writes in the third part of his majestic prose poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that “whatever is his own is well concealed from the owner; and of all the treasures, it is our own that we dig up last.” Symon would surely agree. The filmgoer willing to experience mortality and decay will discover in 63 Up, as an extension of the Up Series, not only the chronicling of human lives and the revealing of identities, but also the gentle probing of that question to which the Jesuit maxim subtly points: Who am I? This probing of a perennial human concern is the ultimate generosity of the series, the gift to those investing themselves in its human lives. Seeing them, we see ourselves, and see ourselves seeing them. There may be no activity more rewarding, and none more enigmatic.

William Hepner is a freelance writer who writes about film and the arts. He is a contributor to the Berlin Film Journal.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2