The Up Documentaries movie review (1985)
Because all of the subjects are British, there are qualities that leap out for an American viewer. One is how articulate the subjects are; from the three working-class girls in a pub to the well-born graduate of the best schools, from the taxi driver to the Cockney who moved with his wife to Australia, they're all good at self-expression. They speak with precision, and often with grace and humor. One ponders the inarticulate murkiness, self-help cliches, sports metaphors and management truisms that clutter American speech.
It is also evident that class counts for more in Britain than in America. One woman says she believed when she was younger that there were "opportunities," but now sees that she was deceived. We sense those in the middle are the least content. The working classes seem sure of themselves, confident in their idiom, realistic and humorous. The fortunate also seem to have found interesting options (an upper class twit at 21 refused to be interviewed at 28--but by 35, amazingly, had flowered into a worker for a relief project in Eastern Europe). Those caught in the middle seem more trapped, unless education has released them; the nuclear physicist relaxes on the shores of a Wisconsin lake and talks about how American universities open up new opportunities for every generation.
Watching the films again, I became more aware of the role the countryside plays in British lives. Many of the subjects live or visit the country, and are at home with gardening and the outdoors; during one interview the camera casually changes focus to show the subject's dog, in the background, capturing a rabbit.
The subjects are good sports. At 7 they didn't volunteer for this project, but now they're stuck with it. The series plays on British television, so their notoriety is renewed on a regular basis; it doesn't help to grow gray, because the cameras keep up with them. Some refer to the project ruefully, but there have been fewer dropouts that one would imagine, and one subject came back in from the cold. Even Neil, the loner who is the most worrisome of the subjects, comes forward. They accept that they're part of an enterprise larger than themselves: Their films exploit, more fully than any others, the use of cinema as a time machine. I feel as if I know these subjects, and indeed I do know them better than many of the people I work with every day, because I know what they dreamed of at 7, their hopes at 14, the problems they faced in their early 20s, and their marriages, their jobs, their children, even their adulteries.
