Roger was good at dishing, but he could also take it.
Right at the very top of Life Itself, director Steve James reveals (in voice-over) that he started shooting the documentary just five months before Roger Ebert died in the spring of 2013. He never comes right out and says so, but it's a fair bet that if he'd waited much longer, there wouldn't have been a film at all -- at least, not in its present form. Drawn from Ebert's 2011 memoir of the same name, excerpts of which are included as narration along with some of his more memorable blog posts, the film covers his extraordinary life and career, from his humble beginnings as a novice film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times to his collaboration with filmmaker Russ Meyer on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to his Pulitzer to becoming one of the most unlikely of television personalities.
As James and many of his interview subjects (whose ranks include film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum, Richard Corliss, and A.O. Scott, and filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris) make plain, Ebert had two great partnerships in his life. One was with his wife Chaz, whom he met in AA (the film, like his memoir, doesn't gloss over the years that he was a heavy drinker) and who provided him with an instant family in the form of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren. The other, of course, was the man he was ostensibly joined to at the hip for two-plus decades, Gene Siskel. Understandably, their highly (and entertainingly) contentious relationship gets as much attention as his present-day tribulations as his health deteriorates and he's forced to go into rehab for a fifth and then a sixth time.
Life Itself is hard to watch at times, but Ebert was so forthright about the ways that cancer had literally eaten away at him that it would be cowardly to look away. He was resolute enough to play the hand that was dealt him, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles and finding his voice in a way that was truly courageous. He's an inspiration to us all.