Life Itself

Also the name of his autobiography, Life Itself is a documentary chronicling the life and career (and, ultimately, the death) of film critic Roger Ebert. This is at once an interesting, funny, moving, slightly disturbing, and flawed documentary. On the one hand, it does a terrific job of capturing Ebert's early career and his rise as a partner with Gene Siskel. And we get some fun outtakes, some of which I'd seen before. And there's a nice interview with Gene's widow. And we get lots of footage of Ebert as well as he undergoes treatment with his wife Chaz by his side. That's where the slightly disturbing part comes in - Ebert's cancer treatment included the removal of his lower jaw. He's left with, well, the skin from his chin hanging down, making it so you can look through his mouth and see his neck. That's a bit unsettling. Through it all, Ebert maintains a mostly good attitude, staying funny, communicating via his trusty Macbook. He keeps busy, writing a lot and still watching movies. Unfortunately, he declined faster than expected and so the director was left finishing sooner than he wanted, at least as far as Ebert footage is concerned. And there's where the "flawed" aspect of the movie comes in. They left out an entire segment of Ebert's career - his partnership with Richard Roeper, which lasted nearly a decade - entirely, a terrible oversight that wounded Roeper personally. And they never directly get Ebert's final opinion on Siskel. They were enemies at first and that shifted over time but even Gene's widow isn't sure 100% certain of how they felt about each other. The director spent plenty of time with Ebert to get a full answer from him on this topic but never does. An interesting, if sad, side story is that Siskel never told Ebert he was sick with his brain tumor before passing. Roger was deeply wounded by that and he vowed to make his own illness known so that people wouldn't feel hurt by not knowing. Anyway, this was very good. 8/10.