At the start of “The Oldest Person in the World,” director Sam Green (“32 Sounds”) plainly confesses, “At the beginning of making a movie I never know what I’m doing or why.” By the end of his latest documentary, which is billed as the first part of a decennial series in the vein of Michael Apted’s “Up” saga, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that Green had figured that out for himself. And yet, I wasn’t really bothered by that either. A heartfelt, wistful, and aggressively poignant collection of interviews with seven different 116 and 117-year-olds who, at the time of filming, are recognized as the single most aged individuals on planet Earth (a title that has a funny way of changing hands on a semi-regular basis), Green’s project introduces itself with the shaky premise that everyone shares his passion for the oldest people in the world. “Why are we so captivated by this one person who has been around longer than anyone else?,” he asks in his slow and singsongy voice, which brims with manufactured wonder and narrates almost every minute of the film.And my immediate answer to that question was simply: We aren’t. Just because their deaths make for good local news fodder doesn’t mean that most of us have a special fascination with these centenarian record-holders. Frankly, most of them are a lot more interesting in theory than they are in conversation. Green spontaneously visits his first oldest person when he hears that her public birthday celebration is being held near his apartment in Brooklyn, but when he gets there he finds that Susannah Mushatt Jones is fast asleep in front of her cake.Not only does Jones fail to wake up before everyone goes home, but Green has to listen to then-mayor Eric Adams give a presumably deranged speech about her life (and probably also, like, Istanbul and the magic of wheeled trash bins). That was in the summer of 2015, and while subsequent interviews the filmmaker conducted over the next 10 years are more lucid, several of them impressively so, but none of their semi-intact memories or non-advice about fending off the grim reaper are more compelling than the sheer fact of their longevity. Having said that, “The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand. Just when it seems like the documentary will be little more than a succession of people born in the 19th century or able to recall a Lord Byron poem they first memorized 107 years earlier, Green swivels the camera around and makes himself the film’s truest subject. The navel-gazing nature of his voiceover narration lends that pivot a feeling of inevitability, but Green is such an open-hearted and genuine searcher that I couldn’t bring myself to begrudge him that. ~this review continues on IndieWire~
