Life Itself was not what I was expecting. I was thinking this was going to be one of those Real Hollywood Story kind of shows with a lot of old clips and interviews and such. And while there was that, there was also a lot of footage of Roger Ebert in the weeks before he died. Oddly, I didn’t really care to watch a dying man without a jaw getting his throat cleaned with a suction tube every now and then.
The rest of the film was fine. The story of Ebert coming up through the newspaper ranks. His years at college. The time he won the Pulitzer Prize. His amazingly volatile relationship with Gene Siskel. His obsessions with certain directors. How he wrote about other things than movies. His life story was a lot of fun and very interesting. But…the film kept going back to Roger in a wheelchair or a hospital bed waiting to die.
Cary Grant famously abandoned making movies once he reached a point where he felt he was no longer ‘Cary Grant.’ But that was in a time before social media where whoring yourself to the bitter end was a bit more frowned upon than it is now.
Should they have left out the last chapter of Roger’s life? Maybe not, but I didn’t need it to take up the bulk of a film about his whole life. If they had titled it The Death of Roger Ebert, I would have been less likely to have watched it. As it is I feel like I was ambushed by Life Itself and its grim images.
Roger had a lot of health problems, but I’ll be honest here, I could care less about his cancer. I was interested in his career as a film critic and his relationship with Gene Siskel. Life Itself would have been a good film if the death scenes hadn’t been there at all.
