Owen Gleiberman describes the new documentary about Roger Ebert as “deeply enthralling”:
Here are some of the things I didn’t know about Ebert that I learned from Life Itself. I’d always assumed that his rock-steady gaze and toweringly brash, domineering personality grew out of his status as America’s most influential celebrity movie critic — but, in fact, those things were fully there when he was in college, editing the school newspaper with a fearsome, cocky-beyond-his-years arrogance that made him a campus legend. I knew that countless filmmakers were indebted to him, but I didn’t know that Martin Scorsese, crawling out of his heavy addiction period, credited Ebert (and Siskel) with bringing him back from the dead through the tribute they organized at the Toronto Film Festival in the early 1980s. And though the movie should have done more digging into how Ebert first hooked up with Russ Meyer (it presents his penning of the script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a fait accompli — and neglects to mention that he wrote several other, far more tawdry screenplays for Meyer), it’s pretty up front about Ebert’s involvement, for years, with reckless and unstable women. I bring this up only because it gets to Ebert’s dual nature: He was a tubby, ink-stained Midwestern geek who walked on the wild side.
In an interview, Chaz Ebert describes her amazement at the number of people who still approach her with a personal story about her late husband:
I think it’s because he was sincere. When he reached out to people, there were no cameras. People weren’t going to write stories about it. He did it because he really felt that way and he really liked communicating with other people and reaching out to them. He liked mentoring, and so he would answer letters and take time to talk to people who sincerely wanted to learn about journalism.
And he also sincerely was curious about what it was like to be another person. He liked getting inside the head of another person and inside the heart of another person. He said we are constrained in this box of life, but to get to know what it feels like to be a person of another age or race or gender is just a gift. If you’re curious and just reach out, you’ll find out.
The Dish noted Ebert’s passing here. Browse our archive for the critic’s influence here.
(Video: Martin Scorsese talks about Ebert and Life Itself)
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