Film
Roger Ebert, the Critic Behind the Thumb
By A. O. SCOTT
WHAT is film criticism? This may sound like a lofty philosophical question, but I suspect to most people it has a down-to-earth, empirical answer. Film criticism is two guys (and usually it is guys) arguing: shifting in their seats, rolling their eyes, pointing fingers and interrupting, and every now and then agreeing. Or that’s the way it looks on television at least.

One of the guys who made it look that way, who made the crazy idea that movie critics could thrive on TV seem like a no-brainer, recently announced his departure from the airwaves. On April 1 Roger Ebert published a letter to readers of The Chicago Sun-Times that was essentially a farewell to the long-running, widely syndicated weekly program that has made him not simply the best-known movie reviewer in America, but the virtual embodiment of this curious profession.

But the real news in Mr. Ebert’s letter was his return to regular written criticism. A recurrence of cancer of the salivary gland in the summer of 2006 might have left him unable to speak — a problem recent surgery failed to solve — but he has hardly lost his voice.

For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

It is this print corpus that will sustain Mr. Ebert’s reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment. His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do.

He is rarely a scold, and more frequently (perhaps too frequently) an enthusiast, and nearly always enlightening, in particular when he has brought calm good sense and moral conviction to overwrought debates about hot-button movies like Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Other critics (Ms. Kael and Mr. Sarris most famously) have spawned schools, or at least collected bands of acolytes and imitators. Mr. Ebert — do you mind if I just call him Roger from now on? — has no disciples, only friends.

Here I might as well disclose, if it isn’t obvious already, that I consider myself one of them. I don’t say this to brag, or to put myself in highfalutin company, though when I visited Roger and his wife, Chaz, at their house in Chicago a few months ago I did notice framed photographs of my host with the likes of Bill Clinton, Clint Eastwood and Werner Herzog (not all at once, mind you). But my hunch is that some of Roger’s most steadfast friends are people he has never met, people whose living rooms he has graced, for more than 30 years, with his articulate, sometimes combative judgments of coming attractions.

His writing may be what makes him a great critic, but it is his long career playing a great film critic on television that has brought him fame and fortune. And it is worth pausing to appreciate — and perhaps also to defend — his work in that much-maligned medium, which began in 1975, when Roger and Gene Siskel, the chief movie critic at The Chicago Tribune, started a weekly program called “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” on the local public television station. Though they may not have intended as much, they turned what had been lonely, literary pursuit into a collaborative, antagonistic venture and a spectator sport.

Shortly thereafter the program, now called “Sneak Previews,” went national on PBS, and in 1982 it began its long life, under various names, in commercial syndication, during which “Siskel and Ebert” stamped into the public mind, perhaps for the first time, a picture of what film criticism looked like. When Mr. Siskel died in 1999, his place was taken by a series of guest hosts (including President Clinton, on his way out of office) until Richard Roeper, a columnist at The Sun-Times and a sharper dresser than either of the original team, was chosen as Roger’s permanent co-host.

When Roger’s surgery knocked him off the show nearly two years ago, a new round of guest critics, including me, was brought in. About my experiences, which ended when Michael Phillips of The Tribune was made Mr. Roeper’s permanent foil, I will say only that impersonating yourself on television is both more fun and more difficult, with or without the aid of thumbs, than it looks.

As the show and its fans contemplate a post-Ebert future, we should recall that TV-based movie reviewing, now such a staple of popular culture, was once a novelty. And also, for some, a menace. In “Awake in the Dark,” an anthology of “The Best of Roger Ebert” published by the University of Chicago Press two years ago, you will find a 1990 essay by Roger’s friend Richard Corliss of Time and (at the time) Film Comment lamenting that the noble, still-young tradition of Mr. Sarris and Ms. Kael, and of James Agee and Manny Farber too, was in danger of being permanently dumbed-down and quantified. Passionate argument and reasoned judgment, he warned, were being driven to the margins by scales of one to four stars, by opposed thumbs and sound bites.

The title of Mr. Corliss’s essay was “All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?” This kind of rhetorical question is meant to be answered in the negative, and if the future looked grim back in 1990 — when Entertainment Weekly’s letter grades and the proliferation of Siskel and Ebert knockoffs seemed to threaten the integrity of the critical enterprise — what must it look like now that the Internet is gobbling up all discourse? If a star- or thumb-based rating system was the enemy of nuance and complex thought, what are we to make of the splattered fruit at rottentomatoes.com or the numerical averages at metacritic.com?

And if the print media were inhospitable then to the survival and flourishing of criticism, many of them seem now to have become actively, lethally hostile. Sean P. Means, who writes for The Salt Lake Tribune, has compiled a list of 27 critics who have, over the past year or so, been downsized, laid off, bought out or otherwise subjected to a corporate logic of streamlining and syndication. Local dailies and weeklies, increasingly enfeebled links in national chains, no longer see a need to keep employees on the payroll whose job is to see movies before everyone else does and report back knowledgeably on what they’ve seen.

Such attrition is hardly limited to movie reviewers, and it has more to do with the economics of newspapers than with the health of criticism as a cultural undertaking. If you spend time prowling the blogs, you may discover that the problem is not a shortage of criticism but a glut: an endless, sometimes bracing, sometimes vexing barrage of deep polemic, passionate analysis and fierce contention reflecting nearly every possible permutation of taste and sensibility.

It seems to me that “Sneak Previews” and its descendants, far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character. That is not to say that chatting about a movie in front of a camera (actually three cameras), and bouncing from a scripted mini-review to improvised cross-talk, can ever achieve the depth or nuance of a polished piece of writing. (Roger has often admitted as much. When I was at his house, he scribbled a bit of wisdom on the small spiral notebook that is his main conversational vehicle these days: the gist was that when writing, you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.)

Does film criticism have a future? What is film criticism, anyway? It is, for some of us, a job, sometimes a vocation and arguably a profession.

One recent afternoon I was sitting at my computer studying old clips of Gene and Roger. After a while my daughter sat down next to me. We watched in silence for a while, and then she said: “These guys are always fighting. Even when they both like a movie, they have to fight about why it’s good.” That may not be an exhaustive definition of criticism as a discipline or a mode of thought, but it strikes me as a pretty good summary.