Film: Life Itself

Perhaps you've had the opportunity to have a friend who shares your taste in movies, books, and music enough that you know you can always turn to that person for a fun and meaningful discussion about whatever it is you've recently been watching, reading, or listening to. You look forward to talking to this friend because when you agree it is so validating to have someone understand how you see things, and because when you disagree there's no one you want to convince more. Starting around 2007, Roger Ebert slowly became this friend for me, until it became almost impossible to watch, or consider watching, a movie without seeking his perspective. And just to clarify - yes, I did have friends in real life too.

Like many of my generation, all I knew about Ebert for years was that there was a TV show with a couple of guys talking about movies, Siskel & Ebert, and a catchphrase, "Two Thumbs Up." I had seen the show occasionally on PBS, and I remember watching it after Siskel passed away and it became Ebert & Roeper, with Richard Roeper. So when I was in college and found myself getting more interested in getting a critic's take on movies I had watched and kept seeing Roger Ebert's reviews pop up in searches online, it was natural for me read his reviews. The vague sense of the history behind the name seemed authoritative and most times I wasn't interested in reading more than one critic's review. Then, over time, I started to realize I often agreed with Roger. And not only did I agree with him (most of the time) but I found that he would frequently put words to my feelings, explaining how I felt but with more eloquence. After a while it became routine for me to read Roger's reviews of movies I had seen or was thinking about seeing.

Part of the reason I was drawn to Roger's site, rogerebert.com, was because he had been successfully making a concerted effort to grow his online presence. As an early adopter to online and mobile technology, like Twitter, Ebert had been touching a new generation of movie nerds and I was part of that wave. After dealing with cancer for years his jaw was removed, making it impossible to speak. In 2008, right as I was realizing how much I enjoyed Roger's writing, he had written his first blog post and was entering what would be the final stage of his life and career, in which his celebrity and popularity grew more than ever before.

Roger Ebert passed away last year and now I don't have that friend to turn to - at least not for any new movies. More importantly, though, his family, friends, and followers feel the absence of his positive and life-affirming perspective. The documentary film about Roger Ebert, Life Itself, was just released last weekend. It is a beautiful biopic that expertly takes the audience through Ebert's life, extracting, along the way, the essence of what made him tick so that it teaches a few things about *ahem* life itself.

I was in San Francisco over the weekend and so I had an opportunity to do something I'd never done: See a film while it was in limited release. My wife, Karen, and I saw it on one of 23 screens showing it around the country. We were seated in fancy electric-reclining leather chairs. We were uncomfortably in the front row of a tiny theater, giving me a headache by the end of the show (which cost us $25). These things didn't really bother me all that much, though, because the movie itself was an honest, sometimes humorous, touching, warts-and-all portrayal of a man I admired.

The story is told through a mix of interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, along with archival footage of Roger from his show with Gene Siskel, a mix of photos and written artifacts, and then new footage shot by the director, Steve James, during the final months of Roger's life. Using those final days and weeks as a foothold, we jump back in time moving through the different eras of his life: growing up in Illinois, college days as editor of the newspaper, the start of his professional life and his alcoholism, his growing fame, the TV show and relationship with Siskel, his marriage with Chaz, his family, his illness, the growth of his popularity online, and then his death and the response of fans and loved ones.

In his review, Matt Zoller Seitz, editor-in-chief of rogerebert.com, writes that it is about two loves stories: that of Roger with his wife and now widow, Chaz, and the relationship with with rival/partner/brother-in-spirit Gene Siskel. The segment covering his contentious, big-brother/little-brother type partnership with Siskel and the 30+ years they did their TV program together is perhaps the longest and most interesting section of the film. You get some great footage, both that aired on the show and some behind the scenes outtakes, that show their wit, competition, and sometimes disdain for one another. It'll send you looking for old footage from the show on YouTube, of which there is quite a bit. In an interview that Chaz did in promotion of this film, she said that during the years that Roger was doing the show she learned to steer clear of the studio on the days they would record. Roger would get riled up, sometimes excited he had "bested" Siskel, sometimes infuriated at Siskel's seeming blockheadedness. You can understand why when you see the footage in Life Itself.

One interesting tidbit that you might not know if you're not an Ebert fan is the connection between Roger and the film's director, Steve James. As a young, aspiring filmmaker, James made a 3-hour long documentary in the early 90's called Hoop Dreams, about a couple of black, inner-city youth hoping to find a path to a better life through their basketball talent (on Netflix Instant now). Told in a very straightforward and compelling way, the movie really impressed both Ebert and Siskel. Their positive reviews and championing of the film led to the purchase of its distribution rights and jump-started James' career as a documentary filmmaker. And so it's an added value to the beauty of the movie knowing a bit of its director's background. You don't get that story in the film as James humbly focuses on other indie directors whose work and careers benefited from Ebert's desire to find great movies from unknowns.

When I stepped into the world of Ebert I was unaware of almost all of this history. I was just touched by his writing, which some in the film share became even better in this final phase of his life. Ebert was sometimes criticized for being too lenient of a critic, doling out positive rating mores often than his counterparts across the country. But that's because of at least two things. First, he considered it his role to help people find movies that they will like, and that meant reviewing it based on who the audience of a movie was and what their expectations would be - not comparing it always against the greatest films (see the heated discussion on Benji the Hunted from the movie). The second was that Roger loved movies and wanted to love a movie when he saw it. He was always looking for the next great film and the story that it told. This, primarily, is what made him such a well-loved critic. And that attitude towards movies seems to be an extension of his attitude toward life, especially in his later years. That comes out in his writing and it comes out beautifully in this movie on his life.