Life Itself: It Truly Is Beauty to Behold

Director: Steven James
Genre: Documentary
Starring: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Marlene Siskel, Errol Morris, Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay
Distributed by: Magnolia Pictures
Release Date: July 4, 2014
My Rating: 9/10

Any major cinephile should know who Roger Ebert was, or at least have heard the name. This documentary, directed by Steven James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) and based on the eponymous memoir written by Ebert, presents an elaborate, in-depth view of the life and career of one of the most renown American film critics of the twentieth century.

The film traces Ebert's humble beginnings growing up as the son of a bookkeeper and electrician in Urbana, Illinois, where he served as a sports writer for the local town paper as a high-schooler at the age of 15. The film then explains how his work as a writer and editor for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led him to enroll in a yearlong master's in English/fellowship program at the University in Cape Town. This, in turn, helped Ebert become a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and after writing several freelance pieces for the Chicago Daily News, was referred by the paper's editor to the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, where Ebert was hired as a full-time film critic in 1967 after about a year of working as a feature writer.

The documentary then focuses on the wide range of film genres that Ebert reviewed along with Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, his relationship with his wife Chaz, the debilitating thyroid cancer diagnosed in 2002 and subsequent fractured hip that led to his death in April 2013, and his active participation in digital promotion through the creation of his blog, personal website, and Twitter profile as outlets to continue publishing his reviews.

The film begins like many other documentaries: with a few simple facts churned out, with no major emotional attachment, about the subject's upbringing, a collection of old photographs and raw footage of Ebert's start. The pictures show a young man (with a round, pudgy face that appears to be an almost exact, fresher replica of his face as an older man) enthusiastically entering the realm of journalism and churning through different topics before settling on his ultimate passion for moving pictures.

However, the biography soon evolves into much more than a simple linear narrative centered on Ebert's career as a film reviewer. Through the eyes of those who knew him best, primarily his wife Chaz, his friend and colleague Gene Siskel's wife Marlene, and great contemporary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese (who serves as executive producer of the documentary) and Errol Morris with whom Ebert also became close, surfaces an intricate analysis of the critic's outlook on life's subjectiveness as portrayed through cinema. Steve James, along with many of these commentators, (especially Chaz) paints a portrait of a man who seemed capable of finding humor even in the most morose and tense situations.

The raw footage of Ebert's heated arguments with Gene Siskel (on their many syndicated film review TV shows) over both the approach and perspective on certain films seem to initially depict these arguments as amusing, then increasingly destructive and even pathetic. One could almost compare the two celebrated critics to a pair of petulant children in a playground quarreling over a playing ball. Siskel's narrow-mindedness, pedantry and ego appeared to have collided head-on time and again with Ebert's open-mindedness. Ebert himself was also not without certain faults, however, as his occasional scathing remarks demonstrated. At one point while preparing a promo for 3 different films, Ebert's filter evaporates as he caustically jokes: "For Gene, speech seems to be a second language." The brief uncomfortable silence that follows as Siskel struggles to formulate a retort comes as no surprise. Ebert clearly also had a bit of an inflated ego, as demonstrated by his belief that winning a Pulitzer Prize qualified him to write high-caliber reviews about anything.

Likewise, Ebert's unabashed joke as a panelist at a film convention that "The main reason I used to come to these things was in the hopes that I would get laid" may have drawn hearty laughs from many attendees, although I'm sure a comment like this equally elicited cringes from many members of the film industry who received this as a rather creepy remark from a not-so-young outsider.

In the end, of course, it is not until Siskel dies in 1999 that Ebert seemed to have really praised his former fellow critic. Per usual, the aphorism "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" has never rung more true. Whether Ebert's change in his description of Siskel post-death appears hypocritical is up for the audience to decide.

What is perhaps greatest about this film is its emphasis on Ebert's unbridled optimism, resilience and sense of humor despite the cancer that left him looking like an emaciated zombie with a horrifyingly protruding jaw and a broken hipbone. Yes, one could easily compare his case to that of Stephen Hawking because of this. Nevertheless, what makes Ebert's story different is his anthology of work and expertise in a creative field that appealed to human emotions, unlike physical laws of nature such as quantum mechanics. (Not to demean Hawking's groundbreaking work, of course, just simply stating the inherent difference between art and science)

Chaz Ebert provides a very authentic image of her late husband as a man who found catharsis not simply in films but in the everyday moments. Likewise, Marlene Siskel's account of Ebert and her own late husband's tug-of-war relationship, though second-hand, shows how much the two critics truly learned from each other, and how genuinely Ebert respected Gene Siskel despite their diverging viewpoints and how sorely Ebert missed him after his death due to a brain tumor.

Reviewing a documentary is always difficult, partly because documentary films generally present facts and footage that are indisputable and not understated, glorified, or overdramatized by unrealistic plot additions, distortions, or one-dimensional perspectives like the ones Hollywood biopics sometimes tend to adopt. However, Life Itself is an informative, entertaining, heart-wrenching, and multi-faceted look into the life, career, and mindset of a man whose strove to derive happiness and meaning from so many of his endeavors. I don't know if they ever met, but I'm sure Roger Ebert and Roberto Benigni would wholeheartedly agree: La vita e bella. Life truly is beautiful.