Review: Michael Apted’s 63 Up Is a Grand Meditation on Mortality

Throughout, the remaining participants take stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures.

63 Up
Photo: BritBox

Intimations of mortality inform much of 63 Up, the ninth and latest installment of director Michael Apted’s monumental Up series, which has checked in with a representative cross-section of 14 Britons every seven years since 1964, when they were seven years old. In one sense, the elegiac edge to 63 Up can be put down to a structural factor: The participants are now in their autumn years, nearing or at retirement age, and thus in an ideal position to look back over their lives, taking stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures. Most of them find themselves suspended, as it were, between generations: dealing with aging or infirm parents while trying to leave their mark on the next generation.

When it comes to two participants, the pall of finitude hangs all too heavy. Lynn, a librarian, passed away five years ago owing to a brain condition that had been documented earlier in the series, triggered by an almost ridiculously mundane accident: She was struck in the arm by a swing while playing with her grandchildren. In one of the film’s most unabashedly affecting sequences, Apted gathers her family around the table to discuss Lynn’s volunteer work and literacy advocation, a legacy that’s literalized when the local library endows a reading room with a plaque in her honor. Elsewhere, nuclear physicist and academician Nick has been diagnosed with throat cancer and a concomitant blood disease, leaving him to ruminate on the nature of his existence, in particular emotions brought to the fore by the recent death of his father. “All the things we repress as hard as we can,” as Nick puts it.

The phenomenon of Brexit allows Apted to delve more explicitly into politics and the British class system than he has in some of the more recent installments. Needless to say, no one thinks Brexit is a great idea, not even Tony, who works as a cab driver and initially voted for the measure but now suspects he might have been hoodwinked. More nuanced are responses to the question of where the class system is at nowadays. Some say it still thrives, some that it’s been replaced by a sort of superficial meritocracy based solely on fame and fortune. No one seems too hopeful for the future, and most of the participants speak to the steady narrowing of opportunities for well-paying jobs and quality housing.

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The bedrock question of identity that the Up series explores is contained in the Jesuit motto that opened the first film, Seven Up!, and gets trotted out in every subsequent installment: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” To what extent, Apted’s series asks, are we made by where we came from—the legacy of our parents and our early education? How free are we to create ourselves from moment to moment? When asked, nearly every participant in 63 Up recognizes a certain truth in the Jesuitical credo, and detects a definite resemblance between who they are now and who they were then.

Watching Apted’s film shuttle back and forth through the participants’ lives, it’s abundantly clear that the trajectory of any given life can never be seen clearly from the beginning. It’s one of the reasons viewers want to keep checking back in with these folks. Even as opportunities for radical existential change seem to be funneling down toward the absolute zero of extinction, there are always developments that continue to surprise us. And, with the Up series, the one figure who’s embodied that truth more often than any other is Neil.

From college dropout to member of government, Neil’s arc certainly has been the most egregiously dramatic. At 63, he seems perched on the precise point halfway between settled and uprooted, splitting his time between rural Cumbria and rural France, between performing lay ministry and dealing with the fallout of a failed marriage. In a perfectly apt final shot, we see Neil bicycling off into the distance, the next stage in his life’s journey anybody’s guess.

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Score: 
 Director: Michael Apted  Distributor: BritBox  Running Time: 139 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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