The Jesuit maxim “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”—portentous, mysterious, mildly weird—is well known to fans of Michael Apted’s “Up” series of documentaries, which has followed the lives of a collection of British people since 1964. As a young researcher at Granada Television, in Manchester, a year out of university, Apted helped choose the children who became the subjects of the first film, “Seven Up!”; every seven years since, he’s given us the gift of an update. In “63 Up,” which opens in the U.S. this week, we begin to see the end. The subjects’ physical changes startle and fascinate us; watching aging in these films is like scanning the progressive class-year groups at a high-school reunion. At sixty-three, our friends aren’t elderly but are just beginning to look like senior citizens; they’re talking about retirement, grandchildren, how their lives have gone. But everyone’s personality—Apted’s included—is exactly the same. As each portrait begins, anticipation sets in as we await new details about an ordinary life.
The “Up” series is nearly spellbinding in its sense of accumulated meaning—a feeling that’s enhanced by its form. Over the years, Apted and his longtime editor, Kim Horton, have incorporated several clips again and again, and seeing and hearing them strengthens the films’ incantatory quality. Many lines from “Seven Up!” have become as familiar as song lyrics: “I wanna be a jockey when I grow up, yeah, I wanna be a jockey when I grow up!”; “I read the Financial Times”; “My heart’s desire is to see my daddy”; “I’m going to work at Woolworth’s”; “Stop that at once!”; and so on. The backbeat could come from the Monotones’ “What Would I Do,” to which our young innocents dance together at a party, balloons popping violently as the classes mingle. At this point, “Seven Up!,” black-and-white and bursting with energy, feels like a sacred artifact, beautiful and odd in detail, to which we return again and again to scrutinize against the passing of time. “63 Up” is the ninth in the series; Apted, who has also directed other acclaimed films, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Nell,” is seventy-eight. The question of how much time the series has left quietly permeates what could be the final entry.
The profiles start with a propulsive bang: Tony the cabbie, a fan favorite, and his rough-and-tumble Cockney exhortations. Tony the boy has always been evident in Tony the man. In “Seven Up!,” he races out of his building in public housing in the East End of London, falls flat on his face, pops up again, continues running, scrambles over a chain-link fence, and gets in line at the entrance of his school. In class, he proceeds to wiggle around, impossible to contain. (“His girlfriend calls him a monkey,” the narrator says.) At fourteen, in the faded color film of 1970, he’s working at a stable; at twenty-one, he’s a former jockey, and the phrase “photo finish” becomes another refrain. Tony has clear objectives in life, which he pursues with vigor; if he fails, or the world fails him, he moves forward. “I wasn’t good enough,” he says, about horse racing, and then proceeds to drive a taxi. In “63 Up,” he’s cheerful as ever, but economic forces have dinged him a bit. His second home in Spain is no more (owning it was “a dream come true for a boy in the buildings”), and his taxi income has suffered (Uber is “really ’urtful”), but he and his wife live comfortably, in a rural complex for “over-fifties,” populated by “traditional East Enders”—hmm—near horses and forests and foxes. When Apted asks Tony about Brexit, his answer might surprise us; his political thinking has progressed, too. As you contemplate all this and watch Tony jogging through the woods at sixty-three, juxtaposed with a clip of him at seven, the funny little monkey scrambling to school, I dare you not to weep. Ah, Tony! Ah, humanity!
The other portraits unfurl with similar propulsiveness, if not as literally. Andrew, the Financial Times enthusiast, makes for a mellow, astringent counterpoint to Tony—red wine after a ploughman’s lunch—but, like Tony, he has followed a clearly mapped life plan. At seven, he knew where he’d go to school; at fourteen, he hoped to be a “fairly successful” solicitor; in adulthood, he became one. Andrew’s schoolmate John (“I read the Observer and the Times”), similarly posh, also predicted his life accurately; he became a barrister, and has long been “a Q.C. in a silk gown,” he says. In each film, Andrew has worn an expression of placid inscrutability, and John an expression of wry peevishness, both of which have added a hint of mystery to the spectacle of their lives playing out just as we’d expected. Apted is deft with his juxtapositions throughout: in Andrew’s section, he shows us how the ramshackle old barn that Andrew bought in his twenties (“completely derelict, nothing in it except for manure”) and the property around it have been transformed into a massive, manicured country estate, which he calmly tends with his wife, Jane. John is still into Bulgaria and piano-playing, has survived a nasty fall from a horse, and resents having been typecast as a Tory toff. As a boy, he was “ambitious for fame and power,” but he sees himself as having lost that. “My Bulgarian ancestors were all prime ministers and such, but I never threw my hat in the ring,” he says, smirking just as he did at fourteen. “I don’t have any regrets.”
Most of Apted’s subjects have followed less determined paths, which in some ways allows us to see them more closely for who they are. Many are touchingly altruistic—teaching, fostering children, engaging in public service—and aren’t smug about their good works. This is part of what might move us so deeply about these films, I think—the sense of watching humble people do their best, as if in a Horton Foote play, as the years bounce along. Some subjects seem to have been guided by personality, others by philosophy. Lynn, the East Ender who said she was going to work in Woolworth’s, devoted her life to family and to literacy, working with kids, some with special needs, at libraries. All along, her eyes looked weary, but she expressed joy. Nick, a farmer’s boy in Yorkshire, had a philosophical mien and wanted “to find out all about the moon and all that”; he’s long been a physics professor in Wisconsin, intellectual, searching, and a little restless. The two boys from an orphanage, Symon and Paul, seemed lost in youth; in adulthood, they found happiness by establishing loving families. So did Suzy and Bruce, who started out privileged but isolated. (Clips of the angelic, jug-eared Bruce, whose heart’s desire was to see his daddy, suffering through boarding-school rituals at age seven are heartrending.) Throughout “63 Up,” Apted calls attention to the child-in-the-man theme in subtle and unsubtle ways: in a clip from “Seven Up!,” Paul and Symon bang boards in the dirt. “Those from the children’s home set about building a house,” the narrator says. On the nose, sure—and I don’t care.
You can detect, in this film, Apted beginning to wrap things up. He asks questions that cut to the heart of things, as if he wants answers once and for all. He asks Bruce, a math teacher—who went from teaching underprivileged kids to teaching overprivileged kids—what happened to his idealism. “At thirty-five, you seemed to have really strong ideals, and then suddenly there’s been a switch,” Apted says. He asks people about Brexit, about Trump. He engages with Jackie, as he has before, about her grievances with him. “I felt that you treated us, as women, totally different, and I didn’t like it,” she says. (She’s not wrong. Beyond that, I wish that young Apted had chosen a broader range of subjects—more girls, from varying backgrounds, and more people of color.)
Apted’s brass-tacks candor is mostly useful in “63 Up”—but in one instance it’s shocking. Neil, about whom we’ve worried for decades, has endured mental-health struggles and periods of near-homelessness; he managed to find stability, somewhat incredibly, by working in local politics. At seven, he’s curious and funny, merrily skipping down a sidewalk in a toggle coat. “At seven and fourteen, everybody was in love with you,” Apted says. But then Neil’s life “went into a kind of free fall,” Apted says, and the change in him was “staggering.” “How can you explain that vast change?” he asks. It’s bizarre, almost cruel, and we already know the answer—Neil has talked about his depression candidly. But he bears the question admirably, philosophically. He’s turned out all right.
The “Up” series is a remarkable feat—and now, nearing retirement age itself, it prompts questions about how much time is left for its subjects, for its director, for all of us, and reminds us that we cannot know. Andrew serenely mentions the horror of hearing about people who retire and then drop dead; Nick, who has cancer, worries about leaving his family behind. Does he think he’s changed? Apted asks. “I’m still the same little kid, really,” Nick says, as we watch footage of seven-year-old him in a trenchcoat and Wellies, tromping around the Yorkshire Dales. “Probably all of us are. I think I can relate to that little guy. He was sort of all eager and earnest, trying to answer the questions.”
