Roger Ebert was a journalist before he was a critic, and, even as a critic, he remained a terrific journalist. One of the crucial elements of reviewing movies is knowing where the story is—which is to say, having a sense of where things are leading—and he often picked up on the future of cinema from a single movie at hand. Another crucial element, of course, is the lapidary phrase—of capturing an experience and turning it into living history by means of language.
I’ve long believed that the job of the daily reviewer is a very tough one. Ebert writes, in the introduction to his 2006 anthology of his work, “Awake in the Dark,” of seeing “three movies during a routine workday,” and, according to Douglas Martin’s obituary in the Times, Ebert “said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them.” Some movies elicit passionate exultation; others, passionate revulsion. Those movies that repel you are the hardest to write about, and, for many critics, that’s the majority of movies. That’s where Ebert’s unique temperament, his humanistic world view, comes into play.
In the same introduction, Ebert writes: “I find that I love movies more now than I did when I started”—in 1967.
And I think that Ebert is right. Even movies made for obviously commercial purposes are made by filmmakers, producers, actors, and technicians who know that the only way to have a commercial success is to tap into some strain of authentic emotion, whether it’s attached to the experiences of characters or whether it has to do with the awe of the audience in the presence of virtuosity. Different critics approach the phenomenon differently, but relatively few films are works of pure cynicism, and boring results often have their origins in enthusiastic activities. Ebert had the remarkable temperament and the dedication to respond to the strain of human experience in movies of all sorts, as well as the flair to capture it.
In September, 1967, a month before Pauline Kael’s impassioned essay about “Bonnie and Clyde” in this magazine, the twenty-five-year-old Ebert wrote, “In ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’… real people die. Before they die they suffer, horribly. Before they suffer they laugh, and play checkers, and make love, or try to. These become people we know, and when they die it is not at all pleasant to be in the audience.” He also wrote of the film as “a landmark. Years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s, showing with sadness, humor, and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.”
Flipping through Ebert’s anthology yields many such prescient nuggets, as in his conclusion regarding Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 period drama, “The Last Picture Show,” which he calls, not with irony but with admiration, “the best film of 1951, you might say”:
Reviewing Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” he calls it “hypnotic, disturbing, frightening” and admits, “It envelops us in a red membrane of passion and fear, and in some way that I do not fully understand it employs taboos and ancient superstitions to make its effect.” Ebert loved Robert Altman’s warm and teeming “Nashville” for reasons that belong to the forefront of his temperament, writing, in 1975, that “Altman creates a world, a community in which some people know each other and others don’t, in which people are likely to meet before they understand the ways in which their lives are related.” Then, two years later, he wrote enthusiastically about Altman’s hallucinatory “3 Women”: “…the movie mercifully doesn’t attempt to explain what’s happened in logical terms (any explanation would be disappointing, I think, compared to the continuing mystery). Somehow we feel what’s happened, though, even if we can’t explain it in so many words.”
Regarding Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” he quotes from François Truffaut’s book “The Films of My Life” and says: “What’s great in the film, and what will make it live for many years and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the levels Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema.” And his eloquence and insight regarding Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” are memorable:
One more thing: look at Ebert’s ten-best lists, between 1967 and 2005, included in the same book. In addition to many familiar classics, he picked up on some of the marvels of the age—Orson Welles’s “Falstaff” (Chimes at Midnight); John Cassavetes’s “Faces,” “Minnie and Moskowitz,” “A Woman Under the Influence,” and “Love Streams”; Jean Eustache’s “The Mother and the Whore”; Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Jail Bait”; Alan Rudolph’s “Trouble in Mind.” The new age of movies—an age in which overt art films became common coin, in which the director came out from behind the curtain at the same time as did the open and populist striving for commercial success, in which the world of movie-making became, at all levels and in all varieties, frankly, unabashedly, passionately, intimately personal—is Ebert’s age, and, with his distinctively humanist approach, he sought it out in all its wild new varieties and did crucial, yeoman work to make sense of it and to preserve it, and to preserve his own distinctive experience of the movies.
Above: Roger Ebert, in Denver, in 1987. Photograph by John Prieto/The Denver Post/Getty
Read “The Thinking Molecules of Titan,” a short story by Roger Ebert, on Page-Turner.
