Life Itself, now playing on 4 evenings only — July 13, 14, 15, 17, at 7pm — at the Rio Theatre
The most popular film reviewer of his time, who became the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for movie criticism and, on his long-running TV programme, wielded cinema’s most influential thumb, following a lengthy and debilitating illness, Roger Ebert died on April 4, 2013. He was 70.
Based on Mr. Ebert’s own memoir, titled Life Itself, as is the Steve James documentary now playing in Vancouver in exclusive engagement at the Rio Theatre, James’ film tracks the life of Roger Ebert — who, as we say above, was the most famous and affectionately regarded of American movie critics, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reviewer for The Chicago Sun-Times who, in company with Gene Siskel, improbably became a globally known television star, and whose encroaching mortality made him appreciate life all the more — Life Itself is this summer’s must-see, award-winning documentary.
Don’t take just our word for such assertion. Have a look at these reviews:
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
Life Itself, a deeply enthralling documentary about the late film critic who changed film criticism, Roger Ebert was such a compelling writer, thinker, talker, and human being, it didn’t matter whether you agreed with him — he had a way of putting things that was pithy and practical and philosophical all at the same time. Over the last few years, when Ebert struggled, heroically, against the cancer of the jaw that resulted in his drastic facial surgery and the loss of his voice, his life became more public than ever, largely because Ebert chose to make it public (on his blog, and in his memoir).
Steve James, the documentary master who made Hoop Dreams, uses Ebert’s final months as a prism to put the pieces of Ebert’s life together — the sweater-wearing, thumb-wielding TV icon who turned his weekly on-air battles with Gene Siskel into a take-no-prisoners conversation that defined what criticism was for a new generation — all that and more is explored in James’ extraordinary, wondrously fascinating and implacable cinematic vision of film criticism’s most dazzlingly brilliant and insatiable writer.
Geoffrey O’Brien, New York Times
Life Itself, Steve James’s (Hoop Dreams) documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, is in many ways like a wake at which intimate acquaintances warmly recall their departed friend in all his aspects, foibles and quirks along with his talents and triumphs. Deep currents of love and sorrow flow under the succession of often funny recollections of a busy life. But it is a wake where the departed is still present.
This is not only a film about Roger Ebert but also a film very much with and by Roger Ebert, who refused to be laid low by the medical catastrophes of his last years. A friend describes him as having been, early on, “not just the chief character and star of the movie that was his life, he was also the director.” Life Itself is indeed broadly shaped by Ebert’s own interpretation of his life and clearly marked by his sense of what kind of film it should be.
In the film, Ebert’s words are joined by those of many others: filmmaker friends like Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, and old acquaintances whose deep fondness is apparent but who don’t gloss over his complications and confusions, from his outwardly rowdy days hanging out at O’Rourke’s in Chicago (he stopped drinking in the late ’70s) to the defensive petulance sometimes provoked by Siskel during their on-air critical brawls. (“He is a nice guy,” one friend smilingly comments, “but he’s not that nice.) There is a rich aura of journalistic camaraderie and Chicago solidarity. When The Washington Post’s editors tried to lure him away with a big-money offer, Ebert told them, “I’m not gonna learn new streets.”
Life Itself is a work of deftness and delicacy, by turns a film about illness and death, about writing, about cinema and, finally, and very movingly a film about love. In Life Itself, we are at last unavoidably caught up face to face with the absence that even the liveliest of wakes must finally acknowledge.
