Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Roger Ebert, America's best known film critic, looks hard in the mirror and at his own life as if it were a movie.

He was the late child of a German electrician and an Irish catholic in Urbana, Illinois. “I turned to books as soon as I could read,” he says. “There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish”. He started out in public school by writing and publishing the Washington Street News and delivering it to his neighbours. In college he was a sportswriter for The News Gazette and editor for the Daily Illini. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois and went to the University of Cape Town, South Africa for his post graduate studies. He gave up his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. He envisaged himself as a column writer but one day someone retired and he was named the paper's film critic. “It was not my career goal” he says, and yet even with this random assignment his hard work earned him the Pulitzer price for his film writings. Furthermore his movie reviews with Gene Siskel were televised across America for twenty years. His sheer enthusiasm and intelligence make many of his reviews far more interesting and fun to read than the good movies they criticize.

Roger Ebert's autobiography is what I hoped Michael Caine's would be, and wasn't. The former is candid about the people in his life and doesn't shy away from saying what he really thinks of them. He doesn't dwell on his successes but chisels himself as he really is: “I realize that most of the turning points in my career were brought about by others. My life has largely happened to me without any conscious plan.” He doesn't hesitate to shove young Roger in the corner and pull out all the stops: “How could I have been so cruel to a man who had been so kind... I had become a cocksure asshole” he says of his behaviour to his English teacher Daniel Curley. “I was insufferably full of myself” he comments on his studies at the University of Illinois. He describes in some detail his 13 year dizzy wonder down the corridors of alcoholism until he found the exit through the guidance of AA. He wonders why all his more serious relationships (including his long one with his wife Chaz) were with divorced women who had children. He takes full responsibility for the failure of his cancer operations (by not listening to his doctors or spouse and taking advice from the Internet) which left him unable to eat, drink or talk. And yet he has brushed aside life's savage blow and carries on blogging and writing movie reviews. Here is a man with guts, as good as real life can make them.

In one of his movie reviews (A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries) Roger Ebert wrote: “If a parent is remembered by his children only for what he did, then he spent too much time at work. What is better is to be valued for who you really were.”

We aren't his children but by taking a hard and candid look in the mirror, Roger Ebert gave us the opportunity to get to know him. I always valued his reviews but I can now say with some certainty that I admire the man himself.