The Oldest Person in the World Review: Some Things Don’t Get Better with Age

Veteran filmmaker Sam Green captures the stories of aged folks across the globe in The Oldest Person in the World, but at a surprisingly superficial level. The post The Oldest Person in the World Review: Some Things Don’t Get Better with Age appeared first on POV Magazine.

The Oldest Person in the World
(USA, 87 min.)
Dir. Sam Green
Prod. Alison Byrne Fields, Josh Penn
Programme: Premieres (World premiere)

For most of us, the challenges that arise from getting older suck, but it’s always helpful to be reminded of the alternative. Veteran documentarian Sam Green’s latest film delves into record-holders blessed with long life, and in doing so, he not only questions our very obsessions with mortality, but also feeds a general fascination to hear from those who somehow have found a cheat code to avoid expiration for far longer than the majority of us will be able to muster.

On the one hand, the film is a slightly goofy look at the rotating members of the most aged club. While the title itself presents the idea in the singular, naturally there’s a series of oldest people, with one at any given time bestowed the record from such organizations as the Guiness Book people. From Japan to Spain to the U.S., Green visits a number of these individuals crowned at a given time, posing them the same type of questions normally asked (“what’s your secret?”), but also being a bit more insightful in his exploration of the phenomena of our fascination with people born well over a century ago.

Filmed over a decade, Green’s project is at once decidedly outward looking, providing a sort of survey of the aged akin to those who chase fleeting eclipse sightings around the planet, and deeply personal. We witness Green’s own aging, the way his family grows, and even the health issues that creep up during the years-long production. While we hear and see from those surely soon at the end of their respective journeys, the director himself provides a counterpoint, one where as an audience, we are, of course, wishing for more years to come before shuffling off the mortal coil.

The same sense of wanting to hang on isn’t always in evidence from the record holders, and there are moments of quiet consideration when a nun, known to be the second oldest person, would rather trade her crowning after the passing of the previous record holder for some more life for this stranger on the other side of the planet that shares her implausible lifespan.

Green’s film serves as a kind of travelogue where we get to meet these individuals, but when it comes to answering deeper questions about how their choices could affect our own, there’s little to be gained. There are fascinating things to be gleaned, no doubt, from those witness to the massive changes over a lifetime, but it appears the biggest elements shared between these people are the most obvious ones, namely that the final distance of the journey is a bumpy road at best. There’s little in the way here of electric conversation or deeper philosophical musings about all that these people have been able to apprehend. There’s more of a sense that they’re sitting around waiting for the inevitable, their bodies at best barely holding on, their minds inured to more profound existential or philosophical concerns.

Green’s own health scares drive some of those more complex elements of the film’s storyline, and unfortunately, it comes across as slightly haphazard in the way it is pigeonholed to the greater narrative focus. Suffice it to say, what he goes through is traumatic and concerning, but it appears he’s too close to the story to more elegantly attach his own sense of aging to that of his subjects. The shots of his child growing up may be a boon to those who adore the wallet photos of others, but to the slightly more jaded, it comes across as indulgent and insular, a strange bait-and-switch that does little to add to the greater presentation.

Green’s previous films have been highly successful, with his 2002 work The Weather Underground (co-directed with Bill Siegel) providing a tense, nuanced look at a strident political organization, one that warranted its Oscar nomination. Despite literally being a film about life and death, The Oldest Person in the World feels slight at best and trivial at its worst. It succumbs far too easily to the kind of analysis that Green gently chides in the introduction. It’s an odd thing to feel for a film about such profundities to feel superficial at best, but despite its scope and the impact of these many lives, this journey around the world to meet the aged individuals feels surprisingly more trivial than one would expect from such an accomplished veteran storyteller.