Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (53 page)

What's amazing in all of the musical sequences is the quality of the sound. A lot of documentaries use "available sound," picked up by micro phones more appropriate for the television news. This movie's concerts are miked by up to eight microphones, and the Dolby system is used to produce full stereo sound that really rocks the theater. A phenomenon during screenings of this film is the tendency of the audience to get into the act.

Willie May Ford Smith comes across in this movie as an extraordinary woman, spiritual, filled with love and power. Dorsey and his longtime business manager, Sallie Martin, come across at first as a little crusty, but then there's a remarkable scene where they sing along, softly, with one of Dorsey's old records. By the end of the film, when the ailing Dorsey insists on walking under his own steam to the front of the gospel convention in Houston, and leading the delegates in a hymn, we have come to see his strength and humanity. Just in case Smith and Dorsey seem too noble, the film uses a lot of mighty soul music as counterpoint, particularly in the scenes shot during a tribute to Mother Smith at a St. Louis Baptist church. We see Delois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters, a Chicago-based trio who have enormous musical energy; the O'Neal Twins, Edward and Edgar, whose Jesus Dropped the Charges is a show-stopper; Zella Jackson Price, a younger singer who turns to Mother Smith for advice; the Interfaith Choir, and lots of other singers.

Say Amen, Somebody is the kind of movie that isn't made very often, because it takes an unusual combination of skills. The filmmaker has to be able to identify and find his subjects, win their confidence, follow them around, and then also find the technical skill to really capture what makes them special.

Nierenberg's achievement here is a masterpiece of research, diligence, and direction. But his work would be meaningless if the movie didn't convey the spirit of the people in it, and Say Amen, Somebody does that with mighty joy. This is a great experience.

FEBRUARY 7, 1986

The child is father of the man.

-William Wordsworth

omewhere at home are photographs taken when I was a child. A solemn, round-faced little boy gazes out at the camera, and as I look at him I know in my mind that he is me and I am him, but the idea has no reality. I cannot understand the connection, and as I think more deeply about the mystery of the passage of time, I feel a sense of awe.

Watching Michael Apted's documentary 28 Up, I had that feeling again and again, that awe that time does pass, and that the same individual does pass through it, grows from a child to an adult, becoming someone new over the passage of years, but still containing some of the same atoms and molecules and fears and gifts that were stored in the child.

This film began twenty-one years ago as a documentary for British television. The assignment for Michael Apted was to interview several seven-year-olds from different British social classes, races, backgrounds, and parts of the country, simply talking with them about what they found important or interesting about their lives. Seven years later, when the subjects were fourteen, Apted tracked them down and interviewed them again. He repeated the process when they were twenty-one, and again when they were twenty-eight, and this film moves back and forth within that material, looking at the same people when they were children, teenagers, young adults, and now warily approaching their thirties.

We have always known that the motion picture is a time machine. John Wayne is dead, but the angle of his smile and the squint in his eye will be as familiar to our grandchildren as it is to us. Orson Welles is dead, but a hundred years from now the moment will still live when the cat rubs against his shoe in The Third Man, and then the light from the window catches his sardonic grin. What is remarkable about 28 Up is not, however, that the same individuals have been captured at four different moments in their lives. We quickly grow accustomed to that. What is awesome is that we can see so clearly how the seven-year-old became the adolescent, how the teenager became the young man or woman, how the adult still contains the seeds of the child.

One sequence follows the lives of three upper-class boys who come from the right families and go to all the right schools. One of the boys is a snob, right from the beginning, and by the time he is twenty-one he is a bit of a reactionary prig. We are not surprised when he declines to be interviewed at twenty-eight; we could see it coming. We are curious, though, about whether he will check back in at thirty-five, perhaps having outlived some of his self-importance.

Another little boy is a winsome loner at seven. At fourteen, he is a dreamy idealist, at twenty-one he is defiant but discontented, and at twentyeight-in the most unforgettable passage in the film-he is an outcast, a drifter who moves around Great Britain from place to place, sometimes living in a shabby house trailer, still a little puzzled by how he seems to have missed the boat, to never have connected with his society.

There is another little boy who dreams of growing up to be a jockey, and who is a stable boy at fourteen, and does get to be a jockey, briefly, and now drives a cab and finds in his job some of the same personal independence and freedom of movement that he once thought jockeys had. There is a determined young Cockney who is found, years later, happily married and living in Australia and doing well in the building trades. There is a young woman who at twenty-one was clearly an emotional mess, a vague, defiant, bitter, and unhappy person. At twenty-eight, married and with a family, she is a happy and self-assured young woman; the transformation is almost unbelievable.

As the film follows its subjects through the first halves of their lives, our thoughts are divided. We are fascinated by the personal progressions we see on the screen. We are distracted by wonderment about the mystery of the human personality. If we can see so clearly how these children become these adults-was it just as obvious in our own cases? Do we, even now, contain within us our own personal destinies for the next seven years? Is change possible? Is the scenario already written?

I was intending to write that certain groups would be particularly interested in this movie. Teachers, for example, would hardly be able to see 28 Up without looking at their students in a different, more curious light. Poets and playwrights would learn from this film. So would psychiatrists. But then I realized that 28 Up is not a film by or for experts. It is superb journalism, showing us these people passing through stages of their lives in such a way that we are challenged to look at our own lives. It is as thoughtprovoking as any documentary I've ever seen.

I look forward to the next edition of this film, when its subjects are thirty-five. I have hope for some, fear for others. It is almost scary to realize that this film has given me a fair chance of predicting what lies ahead for these strangers. I almost understand the motives of those who chose to drop out of the experiment.

FEBRUARY 14, 1992

is the latest installment in the most engrossing long-distance documentary project in the history of film. It began twenty-eight years ago, when a group of ordinary British citizens of various backgrounds were interviewed about their views of the world-at the age of seven. Ever since, at seven-year intervals, director Michael Apted has revisited the subjects for an update on their lives and views, and in this new film the children born in the mid-195os are marching into middle age, for the most part with few regrets.

Before writing this review, I went back to look again at 28 Up (1985), which has just been released on video. I wanted to freshen my memory of Neil, the loner who has become the most worrisome of Apted's subjects. When we first see him, at the age of seven, he is already clear on how he wants to spend his life: he wants to be a bus driver, choosing the route himself, telling all of his passengers what to look at out of the windows. By fourteen, Neil was a visionary with big hopes for his life, but something happened between then and twenty-one, when we found him angry and discontented. At twenty-eight, in an image that has haunted me, he was an outcast, living in a small house trailer on the shores of a bleak Scottish lake, and there was real doubt in my mind whether he would still be alive at thirty-five.

He is. He still lives alone, still harbors the view that people cannot quite be trusted to choose for themselves, still doubts he will find a wife to put up with him. Now he lives in subsidized housing on a Scottish island, where last year he directed the village pageant. He was not invited to direct it again this year, and complains morosely that if people would only have learned to follow instructions, the pageant might have turned out better.

Most of the other subjects of the film have turned out more happily. There is Tony, who at seven wanted to be a jockey and at fourteen had found employment as a stable boy. In an earlier film we saw him studying "the knowledge," the year-long process by which a London cabbie must learn his city before he is granted a license, and now, at thirty-five, his children growing up nicely, he is happy to own his own taxi. He realized his dreams, he says; he was a jockey, briefly, and once got to race against Lester Piggott.

We revisit the three working-class girls of the earlier films, who gather around a pub table to assess their lives, with which they are reasonably content. And we see the progress of an upper-class boy who came across as such a snob at twenty-one that he declined to be interviewed at twenty-eight. He is back at thirty-five, somewhat amazingly involved in a relief project for Eastern Europe, and we sense that he has grown out of his class snobbery (to a degree; he cannot resist pointing out a portrait of a royal ancestor).

In my review of 28 Up, I quoted Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man." We can see that even more clearly in 3.5 Up. The faces gather lines and maturity, the hair sometimes is beginning to turn gray, the slenderness of youth has started to sag. But the eyes are the same. The voices are the same-deeper, but still expressing the thoughts of the same person who was already there, somehow formed, at the age of seven. And in almost every case the personality and hopes of the seven-year-old has predicted the reality of the adult life. (There is one exception, a woman who seemed depressed and aimless at twenty-one, but has undergone a remarkable transformation into cheerful adulthood; I would like her to talk frankly, sometime, about what happened to her between twenty-one and later.)