The title of the world’s oldest living person changes hands with inevitable frequency, with long-standing centenarians perpetually fading away to make room for the next 116-year-old to supplant them in the Guinness Book of World Records. Never mind that the achievement cannot be bestowed with absolute certainty — relying as it does on the voluntary submission of official documents to a private organization — Earth’s oldest person “on record” consistently receives media coverage whenever the time comes for the current titleholder to die and their successor to take their place. Documentarian Sam Green, in his film The Oldest Person in the World, professes a long-standing interest with the phenomenon, which he describes as a manifestation of society-wide fears and hopes surrounding aging. The film depicts Green interviewing a series of these wizened record-holders over the course of 10 years, yet the film’s true focus quickly reveals itself to be Green himself. Green does not reveal much of meaningful import about his super-aged subjects; rather, he uses his interviews with them as the foundation for an essayistic rumination on his own mortality.
Green’s project begins in 2015 with a media-attended birthday celebration of 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones in her Brooklyn retirement home. The jubilant celebration of Jones, peppered with dance performances by local children and speeches from politicians — including Brooklyn borough president and future scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams — contrasts with the demeanor of Jones herself: for the party’s duration, she sleeps slumped-over in a wheelchair. The film’s first scene, it is also its most memorable, illustrating with morbid humor the cognitive dissonance inherent in celebrating surviving into one’s eleventh decade of life: Every guest present maintains a cheerful, willful ignorance of Jones’ all-consuming exhaustion.
Green’s next move, though, illustrates that his aims are more sentimental than his documentation of the bizarre birthday party suggests. In a filmed meeting with Jones and her 85-year-old niece, Green reflects in voiceover — a technique that pervades the film for its duration — that this encounter was “one of the most inspiring experiences [he] ever had,” despite the fact that Jones was predictably asleep for the entire encounter. The scene is touching, with Jones’ vibrant niece Lavilla reflecting on how caring for her beloved aunt is like caring for a child, but Green does not interrogate whether his participation in propping up Jones as a model of human perseverance aligns with her own experience of aging — being unconscious much of the time, Jones is unable to share her own perspective on the experience of aging, or of her elevation to the status of “living legend,” as Lavilla lovingly describes her. Rather, Green seems to take the received idea that living to an unusually advanced age is an inspiring achievement at face value.
Green’s other subjects are comparatively present and articulate in their interviews — in another noteworthy interview, 117-year-old Violet Brown recites Lord Byron’s poem “Vision of Belshazzar” from memory — yet as evinced in his first meeting with Jones, Green maintains a surface-level engagement with both his interview subjects and the overall social phenomenon of recording and elevating the world’s oldest people on record. This is partially explained by the subjects’ limited capacity to sit for extended interviews, but more significantly reflects Green’s primary interest in this filmed interview series as an opportunity for public self-reflection.
More substantial than his conversations with the world’s oldest people is Green’s narration of the events of his life over the decade of filming, and corresponding interviews with members of his own family. Green reflects in-depth on the birth and early childhood of his son Atlas, the 2009 death of his brother by suicide, and his own diagnosis of and treatment for multiple myeloma. Each of these events is placed in relief by Green’s regular encounters with people who have passed the age of 115: just as we observe the unlikely perseverance of Green’s frail subjects, we also see Green’s active, curious son at the beginning of his life, Green facing down his mortality sooner than he expected to, and the still-lingering effects of the loss of a young loved one. The memoiristic strand of The Oldest Person in the World ultimately lends it its most substantial emotional import; by sharing with candor how his encounters with the elderly lend greater philosophical weight to the events of his life, Green gives the viewer the implicit opportunity to make the same connections with their own life.
The disappointingly surface-level engagement with the actual oldest people in the world, then, is counterbalanced by the emotional sensitivity of Green’s autobiographical expression. This is not to say that the first-person aspect of the film is without fault: Green has a tendency to veer past warm humanism into mawkishness — one particularly egregious montage, meant to illustrate the fleeting beauty of life, instead resembles nothing so much as an iPhone commercial — and Green’s emphasis on himself acquires a tinge of solipsism when it overpowers his engagement with his film’s purported subjects. On the whole, though, Green has crafted a consistently affecting film, despite the aforementioned flaws in his approach. In the final scene of The Oldest Person in the World, Green states that he intends to continue the project of interviewing aged record-holders and documenting his own family life in decade-long increments. If Green’s film does indeed have a follow-up in 2036, then one hopes that Green pursues more avenues of intellectual and philosophical inquiry as he continues his durational project, while maintaining the admirable emotional vulnerability evinced in this first installment.
DIRECTOR: Sam Green; DISTRIBUTOR: Assembly Releasing; IN THEATERS: September 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 27 min.
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