The Size of My View

Dedicated to MT, for having the uncompromising courage to be a great friend.

Opening Titles

April 4th 2013: I am in a restaurant parking lot, listening to the CD of Abbey Road that I just purchased. Less than 30 seconds into ”I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” my driver, a friend of a friend, turns and looks at me and says, “Patrick, Roger Ebert’s dead.” Around the same time, I received a text telling me it’s time to go into the restaurant for the autism group I’m attending. I don’t remember my reaction, only walking into the restaurant whipping out my phone and typing “Roger Ebert obituary” into my search engine. It was all I could think about all through the group. I told them, of course, but no one else cared.

I had known who Roger Ebert was for many years, mainly because of the wrath that descended on him from the video game community when he pronounced that video games could not be art. (One letter to the editor in GamePro magazine quipped that “Mr. Ebert should put two thumbs up and stick a PlayStation controller between them.”) I cannot remember what my thoughts were in regard to this conflict. I do not think that I had any. But the comments stuck in my mind, and probably contributed to my aversion to Roger and his writings.

The first time I can remember reading a review by Roger Ebert would probably have been around 2008. I found a link to one of his reviews through Netflix (back when they still sent discs in the mail). The review was for the film adaptation of James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls (1997) with Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. I am not even sure that I read the review in full, I think I skimmed it, but something about it must’ve stuck with me, because about a year later, I found myself taking out the first two volumes of Roger’s “Great Movies” essays (2002 and 2005) from the local library along with his “best of” volume, Awake in the Dark (2005; revised edition 2017). and thus began my education in both Roger and the movies.

In Which The Audience Outranks the Critic

Those books were revelations. I learned about directors and movies that I had never even heard of before. The whole arena of world cinema unfurled itself before me like the red carpet; a world I hadn’t even conceived of before. Without Roger, I would never have heard of Fedrico Fellini, Yasujiro Ozu, Luis Buñuel, or the French New Wave. I would not know that there was another Bergman other than Ingrid. I would not have heard about films like Maborosi, 13 Conversations About One Thing, Eve’s Bayou, and My Dinner with André (without which I would not have gotten a joke at the end of the Amphibia episode “Civil Wart” that probably left a good deal of the audience scratching their heads). The biggest legacy that Roger left me however was teaching me how to look and think critically about all art, not just the movies. I’ve already written about that before in the piece entitled “A Way of Looking,” so this article will be my feelings toward Roger and his work and how it influenced me in other ways.

You may wonder why I always refer to my subject as Roger, never Ebert (well, at least until now). This is a habit I have picked up from his fan base; I’ve seen that those who look favorably on him, tend to call him “Roger” and those more neutral to unfavorable use his last name, with exceptions of course. I suppose this marks me as a member of the Roger Ebert “fan club” which is not necessarily a complementary thing among this generation.

People have taken Roger to task, not only when he put his thumbs down, but also when he praised something that they thought was remarkable in its bad quality. There are also those who feel he did not give something enough credit even though he spoke favorably of it. For one of the greatest examples of this, I commend you to the comments section of his review for James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) which as you see, received considerable blowback, because he gave it a favorable review with no criticisms, but held off a half star. I was not bothered by this, I was more irritated by readers criticizing him for this, to which I would say, “it may not have spoke to him as deeply as it spoke to you, maybe he was having an off week, etc.” Although I won’t pretend I haven’t been puzzled by some of his judgments myself: he gave Office Space (1999) three out of four, despite not having any complaints in his review. Same for Repo Man (1984). I have also been irritated by his forgetting the occasional detail about a film in a review or essay, such as in his “Great Movies” essay on My Man Godfrey (1936) where he misquotes a key line (read the essay and then see the accompanying clip below). Then there are times where I outright disagreed with his judgment, like with Rushmore (1998), where I was tempted to take a line from Pauline Kael, who had a habit of calling him up and saying “Roger, honey, no, no, no,” and according to him, “explain why I was not only wrong but likely to do harm.” But, as Billy Wilder said, “nobody’s perfect.”

Note: This week‘s post has been taking some time to form itself. As a result, I have split it into two, possibly three parts to give myself time to polish.

Patrick Paul Barrett