FilmSnobReviews

Title: Life Itself
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Steve James
Starring: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Gene Siskel
Runtime: 2 hrs

What Is It: The life and times of the man who many consider the greatest film critic of all time. The Pulitzer Prize winning writer from the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert. With this we get an intimate look not only on his final days but a retrospective on the life he led from the people who led it with him. We get insight into his early days at the Sun-Times, his love for the Cannes Film Festival and more importantly how crucial his wife Chaz was to his life. Oh and you know there’s talk of movies and stuff in there as well. It is at it’s a core a look at life itself, told by a great teller of stories.

What We Think?: Life Itself is a documentary that treats it’s subject matter with both respect and dignity while also not glorifying Ebert. Sure he was a great writer, but what we didn’t know were the personal struggles that lead up to his death. The physical struggle a man whose voice defined a medium had to go through. Struggles which cost him his voice in a physical sense while never wavering that voice in the intellectual sense. He was, until the end it seems ever the critic. Director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) crafts a beautiful picture of Ebert’s mid-western roots while undercutting it with the images of a very different Ebert in his final months. It’s a juxtaposition that is simultaneously heartbreaking and fulfilled. You see the younger Ebert in all his pretentious, pompousness grow into the respected man we know he is in the later stages of this life. We meet his wife Chaz who Ebert claimed “saved his life” we see Roger Ebert’s struggle with addiction. He’s no longer the mythical figure many assume, but a man. A man with love, who just so happens to have endeared himself to a generation of cinephiles along with his (reluctant) partner Gene Siskel changed film criticism with a simple gesture.

Our Grade: A+, Can anyone reading our page imagine a time when the phrase “Two Thumbs Up” wasn’t sprawled across a movie poster or cut into a trailer? Even now after their show ended we relate to the term. When I tell people I review films they always are quick to say “Oh like those thumbs up guys?” Even if they don’t know the name they know the legacy left behind by both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. But none of that seemed to matter to Ebert it was his family, in the end that meant most. I’ll leave you with words from the man himself “There are no strangers in family: I loved and am loved.”