Roger Ebert loved movies—except the ones he hated,
hated, HATED.
But even then he was (usually)
honest, fair, and kind. He was a generous champion of films and filmmakers; he
treated their triumphs like personal victories, their failures as intimately as
if they were his own. Steve James’ richly satisfying, sensitive, stirring biography is many
things, and all of them do him justice. Meticulous and moving, Life
Itself is about the history of both cinema and criticism, about Roger’s
illustrious career, his loving family, friends, and colleagues, his illness and
death—tragic because it robbed us of a great writer, a great thinker, and a
great man—and the memories he left behind, but most of all it is about life,
his and ours, the life of movie lovers everywhere. Because life itself, that
loaded two-word phrase, is what Roger really wrote about when he wrote about the
movies.
The film has a (pleasantly) rambling, stream-of-consciousness flow to
it, underscored by deeper and more serious currents. For anyone familiar with
Roger’s writing, as well as anyone who loves film, the movie is a
must-see. It is also surprisingly
accessible to those utterly uninterested in film criticism, cutting to the
human heart of all this history to tell a raw and riveting life story. The
biography almost mimics Roger’s writing style, in which he combined his
encyclopedic knowledge of cinema with an approachable, plainspoken prose that
could be understood and enjoyed by anybody.
