There is a hometown connection between President Obama and Mr. Ebert, of course, and there is much to be said about what Chicago meant to Mr. Ebert (who grew up downstate, in Champaign-Urbana), and vice versa. He was a singular figure in a city where celebrity is typically the prerogative of politicians and professional athletes, and where the local news media sometimes seems determined to feed a longstanding civic inferiority complex. Not only was he a great newspaperman, an heir to the noble tradition of Mike Royko and Irv Kupcinet, but also the man who, with his rival and television partner, Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, helped to make Chicago the first city of movie criticism.
He was proudly local, his byline gracing The Chicago Sun-Times, his caricature decorating the wall of half the restaurants in the Loop, his aisle seat reserved at the Lake Street screening room. All this even after he became the universal embodiment and global ambassador of his profession, at home in Cannes and Hollywood and, most recently, on Twitter.
Twitter was the last, and maybe the least, of the discursive forms Mr. Ebert mastered. A journalist for nearly half a century, a television star for three decades, a tireless blogger and the author of a memoir and a cookbook, he was platform agnostic long before that unfortunate bit of jargon was invented. Social media, another neologism and, too often, an oxymoron, was for him a tautology.
Every medium he made use of was, above all, a tool of communication, a way of talking to people — Sun-Times readers, the critic in the other chair, Facebook friends, insomniacs and enthusiasts — about the movies he cared about and, perhaps more important, the human emotions and aspirations those movies represented.
An unapologetic liberal (always ready to fight back when scolded for the imaginary sin of injecting political views into his criticism), he was also an exemplary small-d democrat, a committed anti-snob. He routinely answered letters and e-mail from schoolchildren and college students and happily tangled with younger, less credentialed critics who challenged him.
After surgery for cancer of the salivary glands and chin took away his power of speech, his blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, became the vehicle of a newly personal, at times breathtakingly intimate, literary voice, as illness forced him — and freed him — to contemplate memory, mortality, religion, sex and other noncinematic matters. Somehow, in the midst of reviewing five movies a week and working on a half-dozen other writing projects, he found time and energy to respond to his commenters.
It is partly this ubiquity that makes his loss feel so personal, even to people who never met him. Anyone with an interest in movies who came of age in the post-’70s film generations — through the blockbusters of the ’80s, the indie boom of the ’90s and the digital revolution that followed — has had Roger Ebert as a foil, a role model and a companion. It was sometimes easy to take him for granted, to make fun of him (though he and Siskel were brilliant at beating mockers to the punch with knowing self-parody) or to complain about the thumbs.
Like many critics who grew up under his influence, I have been guilty of all that. My relationship with Roger (if I may abandon the pretense of formality) got off to an unpromising start. In the fall of 1999 I wrote an article for Slate about Martin Scorsese that accused film critics (in whose ranks I was not yet enrolled) of giving him a free ride, and singled out Roger’s embrace of the dreadful “Bringing Out the Dead” as a prime example of uncritical favoritism.
It wasn’t very nice, but in retrospect I would not say that I was wrong. Roger was not wrong either, though, when a few months later he greeted the news of my hiring as a film critic at The New York Times with skepticism. What could it have been thinking when it hired a wet-behind-the-ears book reviewer with no film background to write about movies?
“Has he seen six films by Bresson? Ozu?” Roger wondered aloud. Stung, I name-checked both auteurs in the second review I ever wrote for The Times.
Soon enough, he accepted me into the critical fraternity, and we became friends, and eventually I sat in his chair (across from Richard Roeper and then Michael Phillips) on his show, “At the Movies,” where I learned just how tricky critical thumbwork can be.
But none of that is why I’m recalling our early spat. My point is that Roger was both a zealous defender of the standards of film criticism — as a way of thinking and as a writing discipline that demanded as much knowledge and rigor as any other — and a gracious and generous supporter of anyone who wanted to practice it.
That spirit extended to some of the performers and filmmakers who felt the sting of his negative judgment. His brutal Cannes takedown of Vincent Gallo’s “Brown Bunny” elicited a furious, vulgar reaction from the director, but when Roger saw a later cut of the movie, he found reason to praise it. And after savaging “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” he was pleased to tell the world that the movie’s star, Rob Schneider, had sent him flowers and a get-well card.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 5, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a film that Roger Ebert reviewed savagely. It was “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,” not “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/movies/ebert-was-a-critic-whose-sting-was-salved-by-caring.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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