Sam Green’s Latest Documentary Searches for Longevity and Meaning
Every new Sam Green documentary is an event. It has a lot to do with his unique in-person presentation/performance of works like Utopia in Four Movements (2010), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012, with live accompaniment by Yo La Tengo), A Thousand Thoughts (2018, live with Kronos Quartet) and 32 Sounds (2022, live with JD Samson).
Another special quality of Green’s films, though, is that they proffer a genuine invitation — wide open, no obligation — into curious crannies and nooks of our life on Earth. As interviewer and narrator, Green is an empathetic and acutely nonjudgmental witness of whoever is in front of his camera. He oozes both wonder and respect at his subjects’ singular passions or off-the-wall perspectives.
His narrator persona is Curious Everyman Philosopher, and I imagine Green’s mantra to be something like, “Life — no, people — are stranger and deeper and richer than I could have ever imagined, and I am so lucky that I found a job that pays me to meet them.”
While that is the Sam Green that comes through in his films, I also knew him personally during his pivotal years in the vibrant local documentary scene after he got a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in the 1990s. He made the remarkable The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 and the 2004 Academy Award-nominated The Weather Underground in the Bay Area before moving back to the East Coast, and it’s fair to say he developed his collaborative skills as well as his voice here.
One of the corollaries of Green being a lovely guy is that his films are designed and constructed to continually allow each viewer space for their own experience. That can involve a prompt (the surprising audio slices that comprise the brilliant 32 Sounds, for example) that makes us remember a departed loved one, or that triggers a free-associating reverie that (speaking from personal experience) evokes the ephemeral, mysterious sensation of being human and alive.
While Green was our guide through his last several films, he casts himself as the protagonist of his latest work, The Oldest Person in the World (screening around the Bay Area Sept. 20–22, with the filmmaker in person at all shows). The new film, which premiered (like nearly all his films) at Sundance and screened at SFFILM in April, is the director’s most personal work, incorporating his young son, deceased brother and nonagenarian mother. It is also, to me, his least compelling film.
For more than a decade, Green has filmed the current (and inevitably temporary) holder of the Guinness World Record for oldest person in the world. He found a poignant way to insert a segment on the subject into a previous film; here he places that pursuit at the center of the proceedings, beginning with Brooklyn resident Susannah Mushatt Jones in 2015 and continuing to the present.
The problem is that while our first response to most Guinness records is “Yowsa! That’s incredible!,” our next thought is, “OK, but what does it actually mean? What does that cool factoid tell us about our world?” The answer, in most cases, is not much.
For some reason, Green asks the oldest living people the same pedestrian question that every TV reporter asks: “What’s your secret?” That proves to be another dead end, as nobody has an illuminating or satisfying answer.
Green realizes that he isn’t looking for lessons to live by from these folks so much as probing why the rest of us — generally in our active primes with ample possibilities to pick from—are fascinated by and seemingly envious of their longevity. (Green doesn’t comment on their frailty, diminished mobility, proximate need for round-the-clock care, the circumscribed routine of their day-to-day — none of which we look forward to.)
I think he’s reaching for our default setting that life is precious and finite and cherished. To that end, the filmmaker grapples with the loss of his brother by suicide 15 years earlier, and the arrival of his first child some 10 years ago. Green has never been a sentimentalist, though, and his voice-over, to my ears, wavers without finding the right through line between hard knocks and soft-centered.
The sticky, tricky truth about life — both living it and looking back on it — is that the profound and the banal go hand in hand. The same could be said of moviemaking. The relative success of turning a rare snippet of decades-old home-movie footage of Green and his brother, or of Green’s small kid saying the “darndest” things in response to his dad’s questions, into an emotional or dramatic moment is, for better and worse, in the eye of the beholder.
Consequently, as with all of his films, watching The Oldest Person in the World is a personal experience. Green’s musings about presence and absence, and film’s ability to freeze moments and memorialize the dead, will speak to many people. In my case, cinematic immortality works better with Greta Garbo and Tim Curry than with my family.
‘The Oldest Person in the World’ screens Sept. 19 at 2:30 pm at the Rialto Elmwood (2966 College Ave., Berkeley); Sept. 20 and 22, 2026 at the Roxie Theater (3116 16th St., San Francisco); and Sept. 20 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in (1118 Fourth St., San Rafael).
Sam Green will be in person for Q&As after each screening.