We are made gently aware of the director’s own resistance to release, to letting go of a force of unmatched insight, of not believing it can really be finished yet. We see the final emails between Ebert and James, in which James presses Ebert with lingering unresolved questions. When it becomes clear that the project will be, in some respects, a deathbed tribute, we watch Ebert and his wife Chaz grapple with the reality. When work on the film began, no one knew that Ebert had only four months to live. Ebert’s slip from this world to the next is palpably and powerfully depicted. James’s rendition of the book shows the arc of an inspired life and, in true cinematic fashion, the end. For the first time, we will go to the movies and spend a few hours in the well-worn seat of Roger Ebert. But this Friday, with the release of Steve James’s highly lauded documentary adaptation of Ebert’s memoir Life Itself, the tables will be turned. Such a sentiment should come as no surprise from Roger Ebert, the man who has often been referred to as the definitive populist film critic. Sometimes movie critics feel as if they’ve gotten everybody else’s.” “A movie critic gets up in the morning and in two hours it is dark again, and the passage of time is fractured by editing and dissolves and flashbacks and jump cuts.
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