James: Life Itself (2014)

A tribute to the life and lore of Roger Ebert, Life Itself was based on his 2011 memoir of the same name, and was filmed during the last stages of his battle with throat cancer, shortly before he passed away in 2013. Divided into roughly three sections, it opens with an overview of Ebert’s life and career before winning the Pulitzer for film criticism and, at this point at least, proceeds largely as photomontage, interspersed with interviews and archival footage thrown in for dynamism, and accompanied by excerpts from Ebert’s memoir. Not only does that capture something of the clutter and chaos of the news desk, as well as the vast sprawl of a life that was already overwhelmingly convivial and expansive, but it also gives this first part of the film the flavour of a talking book, with all the intimacy that entails. Among other things, that allows James to introduce us to an Ebert we’re perhaps less familiar with – the Ebert of poolrooms and hired ladies, the Ebert who co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Ebert who breathed alcohol and was a self-confessed breast man and, above all, the Ebert who, for a number of years, lived the rugged, urban life of one of the melancholy 70s antiheroes whose roles he so often championed. As the interviews and archival footage gathers momentum, James moves on to the second part of the film, which is in some ways the most fascinating – the story of how Ebert paired with Gene Siskel to form Siskel and Ebert, pioneering television film criticism in the process. Almost despite itself, this part of the film makes a case for Ebert as a television critic even more than a print critic, if not a digital social media critic in filigree – a conversationalist and populist above all else whose overwhelming desire to “connect” with other people through movies would lead to him transitioning seamlessly into blogging and tweeting later in his life. Painting an incredibly evocative portrait of Chicago as a film criticism backwater sandwiched between Los Angeles and New York, James’ curation of archival footage totally nails the antagonism and dynamism between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune – and, by extension, between Siskel and Ebert, stars of  a“sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theatre” that returns, time and again, to the “clear, plain, Midwestern” timbre of Ebert’s voice, and his decision to remain in Chicago for his entire career. Of course that makes the final section, which deals with Ebert’s medical travails – he lost his voice in 2006 – all the more harrowing, but in the spirit of Ebert’s own Midwestern fortitude and optimism James doesn’t play it for tragedy but instead focuses on the way Ebert’s situation allowed him to fulfil his mission as a social media critic, bringing him into an ever closer proximity to his many devotees, as well as taking his relationship with his wife Chaz - in some ways the main character here - to ever greater levels. In fact, such is Ebert’s extraordinarily convivial and conversational presence that it only takes a few of his friends and colleagues for you to feel his words in the air around you, as James weaves a beautiful tapestry of witnesses to his life while always remaining in the moment with him and taking his charisma on its own terms. In that sense, the great achievement of the film is that a tragic scenario never devolves into full-blown tragedy – surely the way Ebert would have wanted it – as James sketches out a melancholy, effervescent and surprisingly opaque man of letters, as much an embodiment of the second half of the American century as Gatsby was of the first, and as indebted, in his own way, to his heartland upbringing, in what must be one of the greatest gifts a film-maker has ever bestowed upon a critic.