Your excuse is invalid.
That's what I take from "Life Itself," the celebratory documentary chronicling Roger Ebert's rise to superstardom (by film critic standards) through his succumbing to cancer in 2013: Your excuse is invalid.
Or wait. Lets back that up a bit. I was all set to launch a full-on, bowing-on-my-knees lovefest for this man I feel like I know in all ways except in the real world. How, as the movie shows in unblinking detail, he spent all too many of his final days in hospitals, essentially living as a revolving door patient. How cancer robbed him of his lower jaw, his voice, and yet this period produced the best writing of his career. How Roger Ebert is better than all of us.
But that's not how Roger Ebert wanted to go down. That's not how "Life Itself," from "Hoop Dreams" director Steve James, lets him go down. He's not our messianic figure from the balcony. He's not the mere inspirational figure who overcame the odds. That's the easy answer. And "Life Itself" offers no easy answers. Unsatisfied with the typical laudatory cliches reserved for the dead, the movie instead keeps its eyes open and the camera rolling, offering a warts-and-all portrait of an imperfect man who recognized his own imperfections, accepting them to the point of becoming a better person for it.
Roger Ebert did indeed spend those final years creating the best work of his career, embracing modern communication with his blog and Twitter account, connecting with a new generation of fans, all with the support of loving wife Chaz. But as we see in unflinching detail that's almost too personal to watch, he's also the man who nearly let alcoholism consume him until the late 1970s. The man who once stole a cab from a pregnant woman (Gene Siskel's wife, who in all fairness relays the story with gentle humor). The man who, robbed of his vocal chords, passed a note to his wife with the simple request, "Kill me."
Maybe that's what I ultimately take from "Life Itself." It's not that your excuse is invalid. Your excuse is perfectly valid. Spend some quality time with self-pity if you like. But through some positive force in your life, whether it be your own talents, the support of a loved one, the redemptive power of art, or otherwise, that very thing holding you back can also be what propels you forward.
That's what I took from "Life Itself," and I found it profoundly moving. But it's also telling that here I am, seven paragraphs deep, and I've talked incessantly about what the movie did for me while barely scratching at the movie itself. Perhaps that's my own youthful weakness as an aspiring critic. Or maybe that's inevitable. Ebert, as much as any other film critic, joined the subjective and objective, removing the stigma of "I." Who he was sometimes affected how he saw a movie; if he had a personal reaction to something he saw, he told us.
And try as I might, I'm finding it difficult to separate my own personal bias as a fervent Ebert disciple from the movie itself. That doesn't mean I'm blind to its minor defects, mostly structural. Obviously any documentary about Ebert's life must also touch on Gene Siskel's. Together they changed movie criticism, for better or worse, and to many in the public, their names remain forever intertwined. Still, "Life Itself" occasionally feels more like the "Siskel & Ebert Clip Show," as if James felt too enamored with classic footage of the two men bickering to look away. Much of it admittedly is classic (in no other context would "Benji The Hunted" inspire such a vigorous debate about, well, anything). And who wouldn't want to watch these outtakes on an endless loop?
That doesn't change the fact that "Life Itself" runs a tight two hours, which when attempting to cover a man's entire life, needs all the focus it can get, and other topics disappointingly get the shaft. Who was Roger Ebert, the wunderkind who talked his way into a full staff writer gig for the local paper while still in high school? Who was Roger Ebert, the freshly hired Chicago Sun-Times reporter who essentially had the position of film critic forced upon him and won a Pulitzer for it less than a decade later? And what of his famous spat with Time Magazine film critic Richard Corliss, who proclaimed the work of Siskel and Ebert to be more like consumer advice than professional criticism? James reduces Corliss to a mere talking head in "Life Itself," allowing little more than a short remembrance before moving on.
It's not that I don't understand the bind James was undoubtedly in, trying to hit all those points. I just wanted more.
Maybe that makes "Life Itself" a little messy, a little imperfect as it heads to its triumphant finish line. How ultimately fitting for a movie about Roger Ebert, a man whose flaws were vast in a life that nevertheless contained multitudes. And what multitudes this movie captures! We choke up at Martin Scorsese confessing he carried in his pocket for years a clipping of Ebert's positive review of his debut film "Who's That Knocking At My Door." We wince at but ultimately embrace footage of nurses using a suction tube to clean the large hanging flap of skin where his jaw used to be. And we just laugh at the story involving Ebert, Siskel, and an airline pilot.
Like James' classic documentary "Hoop Dreams," which Ebert famously championed, "Life Itself" transcends its very subject, becoming less about a man who harnessed the power of a thumb and more about basic human will. Death looms unmistakably and unavoidably over this movie, but not shying away renders it all the more powerful.
One hysterical flashback clip from their show features Siskel loudly wishing for more people today with blood boiling in their veins. He's getting a solid dig at Protestants (as opposed to Jews and Catholics). But at least he had the man sitting next to him. And, if only for the movie's running time, "Life Itself" made me want to be someone with blood boiling in my veins too.
