MOVIE REVIEW – Life Itself

Life Itself
Director: Steve James
Writers: Based on the memoir Life Itself by Roger Ebert
Producers: Steve James, Garrett Basch, Zak Piper
Stars: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Stephen Stanton

In the greatest movie-going experience, an audience is not an observer but a participant. We go through the screen and share in the wonder, agony, and transcendence of strangers captured on cameras, until we find that in the greatest of these experiences, we cease to be able to separate the movie from our experience of watching it. This was the philosophy of Roger Ebert – film critic, Illinoisan, unlikely television star, defiant cancer foe, loving husband, and (I never knew this before) Steely Dan fan. Is this a point of view he won us over to one fiercely-argued essay at a time, or a real truth he just saw and put into the clearest words? How generous of him either way.

Roger often quoted his late rival and friend Gene Siskel, who articulated the standard that a movie should be better than two hours of watching the same actors eat lunch. Life Itself, based on his memoir, could have provided us ample entertainment just with Roger’s company – with the delicious between-takes verbal brawls that erupted between Gene and himself, with the stories told by friends and loved ones and filmmakers who admired him, and even with Roger, who allowed cameras in during what he did not yet know would be the last months of his life, and whose wit even outlasted his tongue.

But Life Itself is directed by Steve James, a documentarian Roger fiercely championed for his film Hoop Dreams, an epic which covered years in the childhood and adolescence of two kids scooped up and set on different roads by the machine called basketball. And during the movie, Roger is seen praising 56 Up, the latest in Michael Apted’s long-spanning series of films revisiting the same people every seven years of their lives to take stock of their journey. It is clear that, once Roger committed to being in a movie about his life, he was not going to shrink from the task of trying to capture a sense of something bigger. To do so would violate his philosophy; plus, if nothing else, he had to surpass Gene’s standard.

Enough filmmakers appear in interviews that you realize Roger could champion things in a way that made him feel like a friend. Martin Scorsese recalls, with rare and sincere candor, that a tribute organized by Roger and Gene helped save his life at a low point. Roger went on to slam Scorsese’s 1986 movie The Color of Money, but Scorsese insists that it was a slam expressed with the best kind of love.

Friends speak out and describe, without shyness, a man with an opinion of himself which needed no assistance to remain aloft in the clouds; as well as a capacity for indignation that, in the way it presupposes a particular kind of human decency, I recognize lovingly as Midwestern. The movie describes his upbringing, his early and immediate interest in writing and journalism, his years editing the college daily at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It glimpses what sounds like a giddy blur of a decade-plus as a young writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, to whom the job of film critic fell practically at-random, and many nights in O’Rourke’s pub, hoisting whiskey and telling tales.

They are the phases of life, the Seven Ages Shakespeare wrote about, and Roger, as the movie sees him, accepts the passage into each new phase and sets about living it fully and with great appetite without ever surrendering the core of himself. He goes to his first AA meeting in 1979 and never drinks again. He meets a woman of steadfast and undying spirit named Chaz, marries her at 50, and as his health declines, writes that her love “was like a wind pushing me back from the grave”.

Chaz is a constant. Gene, Roger’s opposite in many ways, but a man to be loved in only the way your worthiest opponent can be, is another. And the movies – tens of thousands of them – viewed, experienced, reported back to the world with his unflinching honesty and passion, they are the other constant.

This is the movie Steve James works to create, and the one that Roger clearly hoped would result. In the last act of his life, cancer grows inside him, raining indignities and pain on him with one hand, and tragic ironies with the other – a writer who can no longer speak, a TV star with only half a face. James puts his camera close, capturing in both the mundane and the emotionally-charged moments a man whose body and surroundings are on the other side of a widening chasm from his mind. In one moment, Chaz and his assistants are trying to get him out of a chair and up a stairway in his home and, frustrated, he pantomimes stubbornly the act of writing, demanding his notebook so he can say what he wants to say. If Roger ever got tired of writing, only then would he be tired of life. His stubbornness could try those around him, but probably also kept him alive and vital through every act.

His openness about his disease, and his humor and defiance in the face of it, became known to the public, as did Chaz, whom he calls his “angel” and means it. What Life Itself reveals is what was less shared but which we sensed also had to be there: the despairing times, the times when hope slipped and those who loved him had to lift him. The movie is sensitive, but not whitewashing or protective, it has the character of a friend to whom you have signaled permission to be honest. It was what Roger demanded of movies, and so for fairness if nothing else, it was what he would have to demand of himself for a movie.

Roger responds very positively to the camera in Life Itself; it seems to awaken his sense of humor. Some might call that narcissism, but I think it is another facet to the empathy he described the movies as making possible. I think he knew that it is good, vital, and healthy, for us to see ourselves as part of a story – characters in a world of feelings and beauty and possibility that we can affect by our actions and choices, surrounded by other characters of great variety in voice and personality. That realization can lead us to the question of what kind of hero we want to be in our own story. I am sure he would appreciate that, in a movie of his life, there is even need for an actor to play him – Stephen Stanton, an actor with a long array of credits, who mimicked Roger’s voice for the audio version of his memoir and becomes the narrator cancer tried to steal away.

When I was a college student, a film critic myself, I spent a lot of between-classes time reading Roger Ebert’s archives on the Internet, which by the standards of the late 90’s was incredibly-robust and well-curated, dating back decades. First I read every review of a movie I had seen. Then, all the 4-star reviews. Then all the Zero-star reviews, which were lip-smackingly poisonous. What changed my own life from his writing was how he convinced me that, whether I agreed with him or not, I was getting the truth of how the movie made him feel – unswayed by gossip or P.R. He threw himself into every movie voluntarily, eyes open, and no matter how many disappointments he must have seen he never stopped going back.

I don’t mind inserting myself into this review. Roger did constantly. He didn’t seem to see any other way as appropriate. I inserted myself into Life Itself and left grateful for the movies, grateful for Roger Ebert, and freshly-appreciative of how something as big and rich and full as a life actually can be, if not captured, then suggested, by the two hours for which the movie screen holds us. All it takes is to know the story, which you have to live before you can tell.