To Roger Ebert: For Giving Us So Much

On Thursday morning, my plan was to write this article about Tyga. I wasn’t entirely sure where it would go; the initial impetus had something to do with timing, how the announcement dovetailed with public outcry over the verdict in the Steubenville rape trial. If I had an extra column, I might still have written that. But at 3:41 p.m., something much more pressing came up.

On Thursday afternoon, Roger Ebert, a revered film critic and a personal idol, died at the age of 70.

As an avid reader of Ebert’s website—it’s only a slight exaggeration to say I read almost every review he wrote last year—I was very startled to read the news. He had always struck me almost as an institution, so much so that the loss feels strangely personal. His catalogue of reviews, from his very first piece on Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” in 1961 (an endorsement of what he later considered one of his favorite films) to his final judgment (three and a half stars for this weekend’s “To the Wonder”), is so extensive that it’s difficult to imagine future films hitting the silver screen without first passing his judgment.

To describe Ebert simply as a critic is something of an oversimplification. In his 46-year career at the Chicago Sun-Times, he achieved an unprecedented level of regard from all sectors of society. His opinions were held in high esteem by both the intellectual establishment and the moviegoing public; in 1975, he became the first ever film critic to receive a Pulitzer Prize. To me, he was essentially an arbiter of taste for our society: his word always seemed somehow definitive, the quality of a movie encapsulated by the direction of his famous thumbs.

That’s not to say that I always agreed with Ebert’s thoughts on a particular movie, or even on his broader views on film in general. He excoriated “Fight Club” and “The Usual Suspects,” two staples of my personal library; how “Platoon” merited four stars while “Full Metal Jacket” only earned two and a half is beyond me; and I’ll never quite understand what he saw in “The Descendants.” And, perhaps most egregiously, he several times stated that he could not consider video games to be art as a matter of principle. This is perhaps the only viewpoint I considered entirely unfounded, as it flies in the face of several games that I would argue have already established the medium’s artistic legitimacy. But even where these disagreements are at their starkest, his eloquence and insight always left a distinct positive impression.

It’s fitting that Ebert’s rise to prominence coincided so well with that of the “New Hollywood” directors of the 1960s and ’70s, for his contributions to film criticism mirror theirs in directing. For the likes of Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, success came in mixing film school tactics, technique, and technology with groundbreaking subject matter, finding equal footing in both critical and commercial sectors. Similarly, I will always consider Ebert’s biggest contribution to be the way he effortlessly blurred the line between criticism and reviews, giving not only a movie’s pros and cons but also a surprisingly thorough analysis that elucidated why its elements had their particular effects.

Through it all, he filled his writing with abundant wit and compassion. He was never afraid to gush about films that were near and dear to him; the enthusiasm he displayed in his many articles on “Citizen Kane” is downright infectious. He frequently found poignant frames through which to express his thoughts on heartwarming movies; his review of “E.T.” upon inaugurating it to his “Great Movie” list, written as a letter to his grandchildren, is truly touching. And his aptly titled books “Your Movies Sucks” and “I Hated Hated Hated this Movie” collect some truly hilarious tirades on some truly terrible films, taking titles from his reviews of “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” and “North” (the latter of which is so funny that Jason Alexander mentioning the film during his talk at the Science Center made me laugh so hard that he flipped me off—yes, that was me).

As I look back through his body of work, a piece on one of my personal favorite movies, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s “After Life,” strikes me as particularly fitting. In the film, which Ebert awarded four stars, the recently deceased are asked to choose their happiest, most meaningful memory, to live in that moment for eternity. In endeavoring to answer the question, Ebert recalls a line from another film, Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers”: “I feel a great gratitude to my life, which has given me so much.” We, too, feel a great gratitude for the life of this luminary; Roger Ebert gave the world of film so much that his loss will be felt for years to come.

—Columnist Jeremy Y. Venook can be reached at jvenook@college.harvard.edu.