A. O. Scott of The New York Times pays tribute to Roger Ebert, who recently announced that he won't be returning to TV--persistent illness having robbed him of the ability to speak since 2006--but that he will be returning to his regular written column. (Ebert's farewell to Richard Widmark and Charlton Heston appeared on his website last week.) Of course, Ebert had made his mark as a film writer (and as the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) long before he first teamed up with fellow Chicago reviewer Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews, the local public television show that made the two of them the most recognizable film critics in the country when it went national in 1978. That show made Ebert a TV star (and, in the process, probably did more to persuade publishers to bring out collections of his reviews than his Pulitzer ever did), as well as inspiring a wave of copycat shows and dueling on-camera critics, including such lesser tackheads as Michael Medved. It also made Ebert a target, and not just for Homer Simpson, who was once seen watching the show and guffawing, "I love watching the bald guy argue with the fat tub of lard!" Some began to think of Ebert as an overexposed grump who had thumbs for brains.
Scott isn't having it. He considers Ebert "one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment," and while his praise is scaled in proportion to some of the other film critics who may have appeared to leave a bigger mark on literature and film scholarship, he turns the relative modesty of Ebert's shadow into cause for respect. Ebert's "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." As he sees it, Ebert's extension of his work into television, "far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character," whereas the Internet and the blogging revolution may have resulted in "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." While I myself am hard-pressed to think of down side at all to writing about movies on-line (got my check today, boss!), Scott's views make for an interesting and well-argued counterbalance to the recent spate of pieces wondering if film criticism will make it through the night one more time.
(As Scott freely notes, he writes as a personal friend of Roger Ebert's. This is nice to hear, since back when Scott got the job with the Times back in 2000, Ebert complained that the hiring showed a cheap disrespect for the profession of film criticism, because Scott was then known mainly for writing about literature, which Ebert deemed poor preparation for making sense of Keanu Reeves. Scott is too classy to bring that up after all these years. Fortunately, I'm not classy enough to not bring up shit.)