Not even The Diving Bell and the Butterfly drives home the mind-body schism as movingly. The surgery-which eliminated Ebert’s ability to speak, eat, or drink-gives his face a simpleminded, Quasimodo-like cast that is constantly belied by the words he types and that are spoken aloud by a computer. (“He had the worst taste in women … gold-diggers, opportunists, or psychos,” says one old pal.) But that portrait is poignantly at odds with the man who appears on-camera missing much of his lower face, a flap of skin hanging in the approximate shape of a chin. Friends and colleagues allude to the hugeness, the Chicago-ness of the man-the appetite for food, booze (until he sobered up in 1979), raucous storytelling, and sex. James-whose Hoop Dreams was the beneficiary of a fervent campaign by Ebert-cuts back and forth between Ebert’s last days and the story of his rise, first as a daily newspaper critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, then as co-host with Gene Siskel of Sneak Previews (later Siskel & Ebert & the Movies).
Steve James’s Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself, is a tender portrait of the late film critic, who managed to put an apparently Brobdingnagian ego to benevolent, ultimately life-affirming ends.
Photo: Kevin Horan/Courtesy of Sundance Institute
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