Sunday, January 4, 2015

Life Itself (2014)

Director: Steve James                                         Producer: Martin Scorsese
Music Score: Joshua Abrams                             Cinematography: Dana Kupper
Starring: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Gene Siskel and Marlene Siskel

While I’ve said before that Roger Ebert was not my favorite film reviewer, there is no arguing with his profound influence, not only within the profession but on the public consciousness of film reviewing as a profession. Who really knew about film criticism as a popular art form in and of itself before Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert came on the scene? And as corny as the format seems today, it really was revolutionary to bring these two critics to television. But beyond that, Roger Ebert had a long-lasting impact on the film community simply in terms of his personality, going up against video games as art and his embracing of atheism that not only sparked a lot of controversy, but expanded even more his sphere of influence. But it was his final battle with cancer, a long and hard fought battle, that really showed the kind of heart that makes a film like Life Itself possible. The film begins with a quote by Ebert to the effect that for all of his life he was the star of his own movie. And that’s even how some of his friends describe him, not only as the star but as the director.

The actual director of the film, Steve James, takes that as his conceit and uses footage from the last six months of Ebert’s life in the hospital and combines it with readings from his autobiography of the same name, Life Itself, to quickly move from his childhood to his job working for the Chicago Sun Times. But what really stands out is that, even at that point in his career, he was a really good writer. Six months after getting the job, the film critic retired and the job was Ebert’s. At the time he slipped easily into life of a reporter, including the drinking, and as he describes it he was lucky that the drinking played so much hell on him in the form of hangovers or it would have killed him. From there the film naturally moves on to the teaming of Ebert with Gene Siskel, but still keeping bits and pieces of his earlier life to interject onto the narrative. The two could not have been more different and yet, that’s what made the show so great. Roger, the fun-loving English major and one of the guys, while Gene was the serious philosophy major and a loner. Roger, who could pound out a fully-formed review in twenty minutes, and Gene, who agonized over every word.

Then James moves on to talk to other film critics, who had both positive and negative things to say about the way that the show so severely limited real discourse about film, but at the same time popularized the notion of personal analysis as a way into the individualized understanding of a film. He also interviews filmmakers of small films that both Roger and Gene felt deserved the publicity that their unique platform in entertainment gave them to promote works that would otherwise have been ignored. But through it all, the love-hate relationship that made the show so successful was also a part of their personal relationship as well, one that they could never really overcome. They were such very different people that they were never going to be friends in the conventional sense, and yet as time went on they needed each other all the more. In many ways, Gene’s death in 1999 was a wake up call for Roger and much of what happened in the rest of his life was informed by the death of his friend.

The last part of his story is meeting his wife, Chaz, and getting married, spending time with his new extended family and continuing his work without Gene. It was a transformative experience and, ironically, much like Gene’s death, his marriage to Chaz also made his ultimate death much more peaceful for him. By far the most hear-rending part of the story is Roger’s final stay in the rehabilitation center before his death. Watching him force himself through physical therapy or having his throat suctioned out is tough to watch, but it’s real, and it is one of the defining features of Ebert’s life, that he wanted to be real, one of the guys, one of the everyday people and contribute what he could to their lives. There’s nothing exceptionally artistic about Steve James film, but that’s really a tribute to his subject. Life Itself is simply the story of a remarkable man, Roger Ebert, someone who shared his love of art with all of us and made all of us the better for it.