49 Up
Review by Ron Reed | posted 10/06/2006
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49 Up
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MPAA rating: Not Rated
(some mild language)
Genre: Documentary
Theater release:
October 06, 2006
by Granada International
Directed by: Michael Apted
Runtime: 2 hours 15 minutes
Cast: Bruce Balden, Jacqueline Bassett, Symon Basterfield, Andrew Brackfield, John Brisby, Suzanne Dewey, Charles Furneaux, Nicholas Hitchon, Neil Hughes, Lynn Johnson, Paul Kligerman, Susan Sullivan, Tony Walker
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The task of the novelist once was the presentation of the entirety of a life. Think Victor Hugo, think Great Expectations: we follow a child into adulthood, perhaps through to death, looking on from a privileged vantage point outside their circumstances. Tracing the vast arc of a human life, we glimpse what a human soul might look like viewed as a totality, outside of time.
It's a God's-eye view, a perspective our own lives don't afford us.
What an extraordinary privilege it is, then, to experience any of the films in director Michael Apted's "Up" series, the most recent of which, 49 Up, opens in select theatres this week before releasing wider in the coming months. For the first time in history, we see actual human lives charted over the span of decades, with documentary footage of the same individuals first encountered in a London playground at seven years of age, then revisited every seven years.
Neil, one of the ongoing documentary's subjects, at 14
In 1964, the BBC's "World In Action" program produced an episode entitled "Seven Up!" which brought children from radically diverse economic backgrounds together for a day at the zoo, observing them at play and pulling each of them aside for a chat about life's Big Questions: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "Do you believe in God?" "Do you have a girlfriend?"
It was marvelous, thought-provoking television. With the Jesuit dictum "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man" as a starting point, the original program suggested that a great deal of the future had already been determined for these children, based on their economic class, family backgrounds and educational prospects. But what began as sociology with an axe to grind transformed to something much more personal and mysterious, even spiritual, as the exercise continued with follow-up conversations at 14, 21, 28 and beyond.
It wasn't until 1985 that the series made its leap to the big screen with 28 Up, the film which remains the masterpiece of the series—partly because it is the last of the installments largely free of the effects of relative celebrity (due to the growing popularity of the series), and partly due to a focus and concision that becomes more diffused as later installments must cover more ground, and spend disproportionate amounts of time catching up the most recent seven years, touching more lightly on the preceding six episodes.
Neil at 28, homeless and wandering in Scotland
Tony, a rough-and-tumble East End kid, enthuses, "I want to be a jockey when I grow up!" Immediately we cut to a proud 14-year-old grooming horses at a racing stable, then cut to footage of a horse race that fades to a black-and-white glossy photo held out for us to inspect as we hear a deeper, 21-year old voice: "This is a photo finish, when I rode at Newbury. I'm the one with the white cap … I had a photo finish." Then the voice of the interviewer: "Do you regret not making it?" A slight pause, then: "I would have given my right arm to become a jockey. I wasn't good enough." Jump cut to the 14-year-old Tony, standing by the racetrack: "What will you do if you don't make it as a jockey?" "Learn taxi." Another jump cut, to a line of black London cabs: "At 21, he was on the knowledge [the intensive training course for London cabbies], and by 28, he owned his own cab," followed by the image of Tony grinning behind the wheel and spinning tales of the passengers he's driven about. In sixty-four seconds we have scanned two decades of dreams, disappointment, compromise, accomplishment and—above all—courage. It is extraordinary filmmaking, breathtaking in its economy and craft, with a cumulative emotional effect that is both devastating and exhilarating.
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