Roger Ebert’s ‘Life Itself’

Ebert began as a film critic for a Chicago newspaper, then gained national fame by popularizing the concept of film criticism on TV with the syndicated Siskel & Ebert show. When he lost his voice to throat cancer some ten years ago, Ebert found an entirely new voice in an entirely new medium, as a blogger whose words and tweets were followed by hundreds of thousands. And when that cancer inevitably brought him to “Act Three,” as Ebert called it, he seized the opportunity to record his own death for posterity, on film — in effect directing and writing the biographical movie of which he had always been the star.

Two key traits

“The movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” Ebert generously explains at the beginning of Life Itself. Perhaps. But my own 12-year career as a film critic in the ’70s and early ’80s imbued me less with empathy than with contempt for Hollywood’s dream machine and the customers who happily surrendered to its manipulative hype. (Toward the end of that career, I found myself standing up in a movie theater and saying, “I’m being paid to be here, but what the hell are the rest of you doing here?”) For that reason, I made a conscious effort to spend no more than 25 percent of my time at the movies, lest I lose a journalist’s most important asset: my grip on reality.

Ebert chose a very different path, perceiving the movies as a means to create his own alternate reality, and just about everyone he touched is the better for it. His approach worked because he was both a master communicator and an empathetic human being — two traits that will serve you well no matter what your occupation. At each step in his career, Ebert was never content to merely fill a job slot; instead he created an entirely new role that hadn’t occurred to anyone else. Life Itself is his last creation.

Mutual contempt

The film, of course, addresses Ebert’s 24-year love-hate TV partnership with his rival Chicago critic Gene Siskel. The two were intensely competitive but otherwise very different personalities (Ebert, the passionate populist Midwestern Catholic; Siskel, the cerebral, elitist Ivy League Jew) whose mutual contempt was the key to their unique pubic appeal (as Siskel’s wife quotes her husband about Ebert: “He’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole”). There's much more to the film than that, though: It's a biography; an elegy to the rambunctious, hard-drinking Front Page tradition of Chicago journalists; and a meditation on a middle-aged interracial marriage. Ultimately, it's a painfully intimate glimpse into the final days of an optimist who, having lost his jaw, nevertheless cheerfully agrees to record his demise on camera, if only to maintain control of the final chapter of his personal narrative.

“I’ve lived a beautiful life,” the voiceless Ebert types on his laptop to his tearful wife, “and death is a part of life. You’ve got to let me go.” Those are the words of a writer who recognizes a good story when he sees it and is determined to tell posterity, through whatever medium is available: I was here, and now I’m gone — but you don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to.