This past Sunday, I went to Elmhurst College to observe a panel discussion about Roger Ebert, the famous film critic who passed away in April. The panelists included Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, an independent film critic whose name makes sense when you hear it out loud.
Composer Jean Sibelius once dropped this pearl of wisdom: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic." That’s true of every critic I can think of, except Roger Ebert, for whom a group called the Public Art League is building a memorial statue to be installed outside the Virginia Theater in Ebert’s hometown of Champaign, IL.
Ebert, of course, is afforded this special honor in part because he is the most famous film critic in the world. He appeared on TV, in some form another, for roughly 35 years, reviewing movies most famously alongside Gene Siskel and later with Richard Roper after Siskel died in 1999. But that doesn’t fully explain why he’s so beloved. After all, no one is giving Siskel a statue. Ebert has won multiple Pulitzer prizes, started his own film festival, and wrote reviews that are still quoted among film fans for their perception and wit. Just look at this bon mot dropped on 2001’s Pearl Harbor:
‘"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.’
It’s hard not to chortle at that, even if you didn’t see the movie. The panelists agreed, with several talking about how they would read Ebert’s reviews even if they didn’t plan to see the movies. According to them, the reviews could be more entertaining than the films themselves, and reading them would save a couple hours of their life. They also touched on Ebert’s accessible prose style. Vishnevetsky commented that he changed his own wordy writing style after absorbing Ebert’s direct, unadorned reviews.
Most of the time, however, was spent remembering Ebert as a friend, colleague, and person. Phillips chimed in with a self-deprecating story about his first trip to the Cannes Film Festival, when Ebert comforted him after the stress of the assignment left him weeping on the side of the street. Steinberg told a story about how Ebert, once a heavy drinker and long after a champion of Alcoholics Anonymous, convinced his stubborn mother to quit drinking. Vishnevetsky, who met Ebert toward the end of his life, had little to contribute to such discussions, but the good feeling given off by the other panelists was inclusive enough for it not to matter. That good feeling extended to the audience, who were allowed to ask questions after the panelists had finished talking amongst themselves.
Film criticism can sound trivial. All critics do, the argument goes, is rank and rate work made by others without making anything of value themselves. That isn’t true of Roger Ebert. His writing is bright and bold enough to be enjoyed entirely on its own merits. It’s full of feeling and thoughtful enough for it not to sound ridiculous when one audience member commented that she thought of Ebert more as a philosopher who happened to write film criticism than a film critic. This panel was a warm way to remember a man who dedicated his life to writing and who left a terrific body of work.
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