Growing Up, Old and Fat

By RICHARD CORLISS

28 UP

Every seven years they become British TV stars: "Suzi, the posh girl," and "Tony, the tearaway jockey boy," and poor dear Neil, and the rest of a dozen or so children who have grown up, or at least older, playing themselves in a real-life soap opera. They were selected in 1963 for a TV documentary called 7 Up and have sat for state-of-their-lives portraits in 1970, 1977 and 1984, all supervised by Michael Apted (director of Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorky Park). The latest installment, 28 Up, includes generous excerpts from the three previous reports. Flipping through the dozen lives as through a family album or social worker's casebook, we find a fascinating and poignant group picture of a nation with the juice squeezed out.

At seven, the image was one of precocious vitality. Whatever their infant outlook on life, whether smashing class cliches or already living comfortably within them--like the upper-class twit who says, "I like my newspaper because I've got shares in it"--these children seemed raring to help shape the empire's future. To watch the original documentary (which accompanied 28 Up in its New York City premiere) is to be charmed into suspending awareness of the depressing trajectory of British life since then. The succeeding films follow that arc; they might be called 14 Perpendicular, 21 Tilt and 28 Down. Taken individually, the interviews have their flashes of cheer and wit. But in sum they suggest accommodation to life's dreary compromises at an age when one might hope for a lingering anarchic impudence. The 28-ers do not strut or rage or tease; they seem already middleaged, emotionally pinched, too cautious to hope for more. They speak Britain's defeat in every tentative phrase.

It could be, of course, that advancing years and their own septennial celebrity have made the subjects unwilling to spill their guts to their show-biz Mr. Chips. Kids say the darndest things; adults repress them. Only in an extreme case--like that of Neil, a sensitive scholar who has become a derelict, with speech rhythms and nervous tics that suggest the young Tony Perkins--does 28 Up offer a character as full and mysterious as we might find in a novel, or in an old friend. But it is not Apted's failing that he refuses to unearth tabloid headlines for his young-old friends. As it is, he has a big enough story: the end of childhood dreams, and the notion of maturity as surrender to somebody else's status quo. --By Richard Corliss MURPHY'S ROMANCE

Emma Moriarty (Sally Field) is a poor divorced lady struggling to establish a riding stable on a rundown ranch she is renting with her last pennies. Her willingness to mend her own fences (literally), and muck out the barn while she's at it, exhibits her belief in old-fashioned self-reliance. Her good-natured sensitivity in demonstrating this among many other virtues to her adolescent son (Corey Haim) shows her to be a late-model parent, liberal and humane.

Murphy Jones (James Garner) is a prosperous widower who runs the nearest drugstore. His marble soda fountain and his car, a 1927 Studebaker, express his commitment to solid, old-fashioned workmanship, while the antinuke sticker on the Studi's windshield shows that he too is up-to-date on matters of faith and morals.

It can only be a matter of time before two such lovably independent cusses get together to make the rest of us ashamed of our hasty and thoughtless ways. The question is, How much time do we need to absorb the splendid example they set? Given the simple schematics of their characters and story, not very much. The only bar to their happiness is the reappearance in Emma's life of her shiftless former husband Bobby Jack (Brian Kerwin), who represents bad values as plainly and as boringly as they represent good ones. But Director Martin Ritt seems to labor under the delusion that Murphy's Romance requires patient and delicate explication. Or maybe he is a city slicker seduced by the languid rhythms of bucolic life. For his camera just hunkers down, awhittlin' and aspittin' and oafishly gawking at these less than astonishing goings-on. Field is perky, Garner is wry in their familiar ways, but the film is basically a bottle of January molasses, running slow. And sticky. --By Richard Schickel SUGARBABY

Marianne (Marianne Saegebrecht) has a little trouble getting dates. Heaven knows why: she weighs in the low 200s, has a face as remorseless as a gulag commandant's and works as a corpse dresser in a Munich mortuary. Then one day she lays eyes on Eisi (Eisi Gulp), a dishy young subway conductor. Lust at first sight has rarely been so transforming. Marianne's stolid features crack into a swooning smile. Armed with subway schedules and candy bars and tarted up in a dress that must have come from Friedrich's of Heidelberg, she prowls the underground for her erotic prey. Will she find her slim swain? And then crush him under the weight of a lonely woman's first obsession? Or does she have some darker fantasy to realize? Is she the Bernhard Goetz of love?

Naaah. For Sugarbaby is that contradiction in terms, a light German comedy. Which means that Eisi, who is married to a woman too busy to pamper him, is ready for some fat-and-sassy attention. Which means that when they eventually come to intimacies, things turn out just fine: softcolored lights, unforced endearments, a jolly bathtub wallow and the strains of Marianne's favorite pop tune, Sugarbaby, percolating in their ears. This is about where Writer-Director Percy Adlon (Celeste, The Swing) gets carried away with his odd-couple romance. Gooey gels clot the lens, and the camera sways without reason like an inebriated gyroscope; bring a neck brace. But Adlon holds his focus on his heroine, who, in ecstasy or defeat, knows that love means never having to care that you're silly. --R.C.