A Life at the movies

“Life Itself” is a rich, funny, and critical eulogy

When I’d first seen the PBS-produced “Sneak Previews” sometime in 1980 and its combative pair of Laurel and Hardy-esque hosts, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, I had no idea that talking about movies was a job. Or even a thing. That was amazing to me. I instantly idolized them both (though I only loved Ebert; Siskel hated “The Empire Strikes Back”). It seemed the perfect life to a 9 year-old movie freak already steeped in a slew of great films, some of which I had no business seeing at that age (“A Clockwork Orange,” anyone?). To this day I feel lucky that I had parents who fortunately didn’t care what I watched.

So, as you can imagine, “Life Itself,” the semi-adaptation of Roger Ebert’s 2011 memoir, is more than just a documentary about a film critic, at least to me. It’s a time capsule of earned nostalgia, akin to being wrapped in a warm and familiar blanket. And that’s before it gets to the business of being an affectionate, funny, and inspiring portrait of the most charmed man I never met.

Directed by Steve James (whose own 1994 documentary, “Hoop Dreams,” benefitted largely from Siskel and Ebert’s advocacy), the opening scenes of “Life Itself” immediately grab us. We meet Ebert in the hospital after he’s been re-admitted for a hip fracture. Due to his well-known battle with thyroid cancer, he long ago lost the ability to speak without the assistance of a voice synthesizer, and, at this point in the film, he has no lower jaw left to support the strictly decorative flap of skin hanging from below his ears. At first, it’s jarring. But it also has the disarming effect of giving him a permanent smile that compliments his obvious vitality.

James intercuts between the present (where Ebert, his doting wife, Chaz, and his step-children deal with their day-to-day hopes against his worsening condition) and the serendipitous path of history that allowed a newspaper-loving kid from Urbana, Illinois, to become one-half of the most popular pair of film critics in history.

Employing the evidence of a life written in the collective culture, James goes back to the beginning to tell of the seemingly predestined road that lead Ebert from creating his own alt-daily as a teenager, to becoming the editor of his college newspaper, and ultimately serving as the chief film critic at Chicago Sun-Times, all by the tender age of twenty-five. Entertaining interviews with friends and colleagues as well as eerily spot-on narration from the book by director James, channeling Ebert’s lost voice, paint a picture of Ebert’s early years as a hard-drinking newspaperman during a romanticized time in Chicago, and the redemption of his eventual sobriety. 

It’s not entirely hagiographic. Ebert could be brash and commandeering. A man of appetites seemingly unsatisfied, he thought himself a cosmopolitan libertine, wore his Pulitzer Prize on his sleeve, and developed an instant distaste for a rival critic, Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, that, at the time, was completely genuine. 

The relationship between Ebert and his frenemy Siskel lies at the heart of “Life Itself.” Old commercial outtakes of the pair acrimoniously sniping at each other for fumbling lines (“For Gene, English is a second language”) are hilarious, as is the one-upmanship of their many appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” They were two sides of the same coin in every sense. Clips from their shows highlight the sometimes contentious and always engaging debates they brought to a national audience, many of which can be found at siskelandebert.org.     

Interviews with heavyweight filmmakers (or as I call them, Gods) Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog recount Ebert’s profound effect on their careers and the landscape of cinema while, conversely, a chat with Richard Corliss, editor-in-chief of the scholarly Film Comment and critic for TIME, makes clear that his views about the rise of Siskel and Ebert’s style of criticism, the populist nature of their television shtick, and the reductive nature of “Two Thumbs Up” has softened little. (Spoiler: he thinks they dumbed down the craft.) 

Ultimately, what makes “Life Itself” so special—and I’ve only scratched the surface here because I’m not half the writer of its subject—is Ebert himself. He spends the apparent end as he would any other time: doing what he loved most with those he loved. Roger Ebert carried that indefatigable spirit throughout his life—a formidable, funny, eloquent writer and the maverick captain of his ship, whose passing leaves the many vessels of film criticism unmoored, never to find quite the same current again.