Theater and Movie Reviews: Aging in Theater and Film
The Irishman
Written and directed by Martin Scorcese
Starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci
The Underlying Chris
Written by Will Eno
Directed by Kenny Leon
Second Stage Theater, Manhattan
December 5, 2019
63 Up
Directed by Michael Apted
Three recent productions have taken stabs at this same
theme, each fascinating in different ways. Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman
follows the career of Mafia bagman Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) over 40+ years,
including his relationship with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, he of the
mysterious, still unsolved death. The film uses digital effects (not just
makeup) to age the multiple characters from early middle age to advanced age.
The very long (3 hours +) film has a stately pace, relentlessly moving not
towards a wham-bang gangland climax, but to a gradual ebbing of life and
energy, with the main characters utterly unchanged throughout in their
attitudes or expressions, much like Boyhood. One meta-theme of the movie
seems to be people are who they are, and rarely change much. Of course, this is
hard to take from a character whose life was devoted to violence and crime, but
Scorcese proceeds in such a calm, measured way that the film is oddly peaceful
in affect. This is a far cry from the operatic violence and drama Scorcese’s exciting
early works like Raging Bull (1976). Even the mafia executions are low
key, almost offstage like Shakespeare sometimes portrayed violence. The movie
relies on viewers’ patience, and willingness to adopt an elegiac, reflective
attitude at odds with the typical Scorcese movie. In the end it really feels
like the director’s reflection on his own aging. BTW, the digital facial effects
work great, but it is very hard for the now 76 year old DeNiro to move his body
like a young man in the film’s early scenes, perhaps lessening the effect
somewhat.
The Underlying Chris, a new play by Pulitzer nominee
Will Eno, solves the dilemma of aging on the stage with live actors using a
very 2019 approach. The same character (the androgynous baby Chris) is followed
from birth to death using a mix of male and female actors of different voice types
and races, not really trying to unify mannerisms or vocal inflection to
maintain continuity. Instead, the audience is asked to suspend disbelief and
let the character’s personal/plot development create the continuity. Unlike Boyhood
or The Irishman, here we are asked to see a person not as a bundle of
tics, vocal characteristics, and recognizable nonverbal signals that remain
unchanged, but instead as an arc of growth, evolution, success, and failure.
The person is what he/she does, not who he/she is made up of, suggesting
the triumph of nurture over nature. I found the play unsatisfying and
uninteresting, not least because the arc of Chris’ life was unmemorable, so
having him/her played by mixed characters did not really add much, and was
often more distracting than revelatory. I suppose the play can be seen as a
commentary on the millennial/GenZ fascination with reinvention or gender
fluidity (the playwright is 54), or on resilience, since Chris is beset
throughout with distant or absent parents and with a series of medical problems,
yet develops into a warm, empathetic older adult self far advanced from the
callous, narcissistic Chris of youth and middle age. Some NY critics seemed
moved by this optimistic transformation, but I was not. I never found the plot
adequately connected-together to really care about how Chris turned out.
I’m not sure I really cared in Boyhood either (I did in the After…
movies), but there seeing the physical transformation in real life compensated
for any plot deficiencies.
Which leads us to real real life, and the most successful
portrayal of aging of these productions. 63 Up is the latest in a series
of nine documentary films begun in 1962 by British director Michael Apted,
following the same group of 15 children from age 7 (7 Up) to late middle
age (63 Up), with a film every seven years. I have seen most of these,
and, being about the same age as the people in the documentary, have grown up
along with the series. Apted uses a mix of interviews with filming the people
in real life with family, at jobs, etc. The current scenes are intercut with
interviews from the earlier films, so we see many mannerisms change little if
at all, particularly voice and basic personality (e.g. introversion/extroversion).
In that sense it is a real-life version of Boyhood or The Irishman.
The series has had an evolving political agenda. Apted began
it as a demonstration and critique of the British class system, which he saw as
chaining people to their class-assigned destiny at birth. The careers of the
characters have generally confirmed that hypothesis, most comically in the
stuffy upper class boy who correctly predicts his public school, university,
area of study, and career (barrister) at age seven, then speaks just as stuffily
and disinterestedly about it at age 63 (he's shown at right, above). Yet some of the participants changed.
One woman chastises the director for asking the girls only questions about
marriage and traditional female roles when the series began in the 1960s, and missing
the way women evolved in the 1970s. The documentary confirms this, too, as we
follow several of the girls from preening about boys and dresses to middle
management in a variety of academic and business fields. This advance of women was
likely a result most unanticipated by Apted as a 22 year old director in 1962,
but now this has become a theme that he dwells on in the recent films. While the
boys by and large stayed in their lanes, the girls did not. So this is a mixed
result for nature and nurture, and certainly shows that a changing social “nurture”
(e.g. the women’s movement) can change life outcomes.
Director Apted still has his own agenda, of course, as he
reaches his 80's. He revisits the British class theme (most agree it has helped
or hindered them, though not as much as in the 1960s), and as a director,
surely picks elements of each story to make a good movie. But still, it was wonderful
and reassuring to see several characters who had dropped out of the films in
middle age return to this one, as age made them care less about others’ opinions--some
of these people developed considerable fame, or notoriety from the earlier films,
leading to harassment online and in the press. These subjects now generally see
the films as a reassuring and calming salve, a tradition like a class reunion.
While one has now died, and another continues to struggle with mental illness,
we see how illness is not a linear, inevitable thing, since the man struggling
with depression has also become a Labour district leader and winner of local elections.
Of the various treatments of aging I included in this essay, 63 Up was
the most inspiring and effective—I agree with one of the subjects in wishing
Mr. Apted good health and a long life so we can see 70 Up and 77 Up
in the next decades.
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