The outpouring of affection for Roger Ebert, who died yesterday at the age of seventy, has to do not only with the quality of his work—Richard Brody eulogized him last night, and Mark Harris spoke of his “openness, fairness, knowledge, avoidance of cheap shots, and joy in being awed”—but also with the role he played in moviegoers’ lives. The wonder of discovering “Aguirre, Wrath of God” or Errol Morris's “Gates of Heaven” redounded on the man whose enthusiasm led you across the threshold. It could have been anyone, I suppose, but for quite a few of us, it was Ebert. There was some kind of missionary fire beneath the easy, conversational surface of his writing.
Perhaps there's no need to add to the overnight mountain of tributes, but as a music critic who avidly read Ebert I feel compelled to speak up. (We never met, but we exchanged a few e-mails over the years; I’m one of hundreds of younger writers to whom he showed kindness.) In the nineteen-eighties, when I was in high school, my parents bought a VHS player, and, with it, an Ebert video guide, in which various of his Chicago Sun-Times reviews were collected. Through that book, I found dozens of my favorite films. I was particularly influenced by his yen for the likes of Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, and Andrei Tarkovsky, the late-Romantic rhapsodists of cinema. I grew to trust his taste. Noticing “The Third Man” on his list of the greatest films of all time, I dutifully went to see it, and fell madly, permanently in love. A few years ago, having told Roger that story, I received in the mail a copy of “Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews,” inscribed to a “fellow lover of ‘The Third Man.’ ” I will not be parting with it.
When I arrived as a junior music critic at the New York Times in 1992, I had little journalistic experience, and would sometimes use my well-thumbed Ebert guide as a rough template for the making of reviews. I noticed how much Ebert could put across in a limited space. He didn’t waste time clearing his throat. “They meet for the first time when she is in her front yard practicing baton-twirling,” begins his review of “Badlands.” Often, he managed to smuggle the basics of the plot into a larger thesis about the movie, so that you don’t notice the exposition taking place: “ ‘Broadcast News’ is as knowledgeable about the TV news-gathering process as any movie ever made, but it also has insights into the more personal matter of how people use high-pressure jobs as a way of avoiding time alone with themselves.” The reviews start off in all different ways, sometimes with personal confessions, sometimes with sweeping statements. One way or another, he pulls you in. When he feels strongly, he can bang his fist in an impressive way. His review of “Apocalypse Now” ends thus: “The whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.”
Despite his celebrity, he stayed on the side of the outsiders, the dreamers, those who didn’t play the obvious game. This sympathy started early. Once, when I was reading up on the maverick American composer Harry Partch, who built his own fleet of instruments for the performance of his microtonal scores, I came across a 1962 review from the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana: “Ancient man believed that the land was born from the water. In his pagan rites and mythology, water was the symbol of fertility. Composer Harry Partch took the water symbol and contrasted it with a sterile modern society in the Friday night premiere of the Illini Union musical ‘Water! Water!’… The musical is inspired, lively, very funny in places. The unique Partch musical instruments—played by veterans—are weird, sensual, and often beautiful.” This was Ebert at nineteen, already handling the mechanics of criticism with professional grace, already open to unexpected visions.
The irony hanging over Ebert’s death is that while he represents a historical zenith of critical fame—today he gazes out from the front page of the Times, accompanied by a testimonial from the President of the United States—the craft to which he devoted his life is in steep, possibly terminal, decline. In 2009, a survey found that fifty-five film critics had lost their jobs in the previous four years; dozens more have fallen by the wayside since then. Perhaps the global gratitude shown toward Ebert will make a few publications think twice before replacing their critics and culture writers with celebrity gossips and recappers of reality TV. That would be legacy enough, although Ebert leaves behind much more. Cumulatively, in fifty years of passionate prose, he created something as grand and improbable as a ship that sits atop a mountain.
