Life Itself

In 1989, when I was 12, my parents and I moved from the suburbs to the country, and by country, I mean a nearly uninhabited, one-blinking-yellow-light, more-cows-than-people, rural nowhere. A place that isn’t even a dot on most maps, a place so far out, they didn’t have cable yet, and wouldn’t for six years. We lived on the south side of a hill, and even with a massive TV antenna on top of our forty-plus foot tall vaulted roof, we could only reliably get two TV stations. We ended up renting a lot of movies to fill those nights when there wasn’t something we wanted to watch on those two stations. The year after moving there, I pivoted from public school to home schooling, which allowed for a looser daily schedule. One benefit was to stay up later, and it was because of this that I discovered, at 11:30 PM on Sunday nights, our ABC affiliate carried At The Movies with Siskel & Ebert. I’d heard their names before — if you were alive in the 80’s, you were aware of them, because they and their thumb-based endorsements were constantly quoted in trailers and posters. But now I was getting to see them talk about movies, to go into greater detail about what the movies they saw, and I loved it. I loved seeing them agree as much as seeing them argue, and I loved it whether they loved or hated the movie. I always gravitated more towards Roger Ebert, though. He felt a little more down to earth. He liked artsy, intelligent movies like Citizen Kane and The Deer Hunter, but he also liked Tremors and Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man. As much as he liked when a movie stoked passion and emotion, he also liked it when a movie played to your base desire for simple entertainment without pandering or insulting your intelligence. He knew not to judge Vertigo against Benji The Hunted, that they belonged on different scales. He just wanted the movie to be the best representation of what it was trying to be. With all the movies I was watching then, hearing that analysis, that way of looking at movies changed how I looked at them for the better. I appreciated movies in a different way because of Roger Ebert. I saw the artistry in the art. For that, I’ll always be grateful. I prefaced this review with that long story because I wanted to tell you, whoever is reading this, my relationship with Roger Ebert, because it certainly colors my opinion of the documentary of him, Life Itself. If you can’t stand a little bias creeping in, well,  there’s several hundred other reviews on here you can check out. But I want to be honest about that before discussing the movie because … well, that’s what Roger would do. The movie‘s present day footage was filmed in the last couple months of Roger’s life, as he was battling cancer and a debilitating hip injury. It gives two parallel tracks — one of his past and one of his present, cutting back and forth. These transitions are handled exceptionally well, usually finding a way to relate current events to the past or vice versa, so the transition isn’t just a slam cut or a fade-out. There is no sugar-coating some of the bad times in Roger’s life — his alcoholism, his failed foray into screenwriting, his contentious relationship with Gene Siskel — but it also doesn’t linger on these or milk them for some contrived hero’s-journey BS. They’re moments in a life, just as his winning of the Pulitzer, or getting the TV show, or meeting his wife, Chaz. They’re all given weight, but not crafted into a narrative other than the one narrative that counts: a man’s life. And that’s really what this movie boils down to: a chronicle of a man’s life. A man who, at the end of it, is looking back on a life lived and enjoyed. A man who was able to freely pursue a passion — writing — all the while falling into a career that made him a household name that allowed him to indulge in something else he loved for a living, and he even got to combine those. He loved movies because of how they could reflect or trigger emotions. He loved their ability to tell stories and have deep layers that requires analysis. He loved the science and skill of moviemaking, and loved to talk about it. He loved finding young filmmakers who were outside the system and helping give their voices amplification. This movie shows all that, as honestly and unflinchingly as possible. I loved movies before I discovered Ebert. But he helped change the way I loved them, because he showed me a different way to look at them. Life Itself shows that the man behind the thumb was just a man, but he was so much more than that, and that he never took a moment of it for granted. There’s so many movies I would love to know his opinion on that he never got to see. He didn’t opine what he knew he’d miss. Even as he spent the last seven years debilitated and unable to speak or eat or drink, he was satisfied with the life he lived, and this movie shows that in beautiful detail. In his own way, accidentally, his life made the kind of movie he loved: the one that reaches out and touches people.