Anybody who says Roger Ebert can no longer speak is crazy. He lost his voice to operations and radiation treatment for thyroid cancer, but he communicates loud and clear.
This month he is the subject of a much-discussed Esquire profile with the cover line "Roger Ebert's Last Words." It's a good headline, but premature.
A couple of weeks ago I got to sit next to the legendary film critic and his sunbeam of a wife, Chaz. We were seatmates at a Sundance Film Festival movie screening. We'd met years earlier covering the Oscars in Los Angeles and exchanged a couple of emails. He was a kind, articulate man then, and he was no different last month. Not in any way that matters. While we waited for the lights to go down, a stream of old friends stopped by to say hello. New York film critic Harlan Jacobson paid his respects; so did a director of the Telluride Film Festival whose name I didn't catch. Ebert was fully engaged. His eyes sparkled at the jokes, his mind devouring everything people threw at him. He communicated with hand gestures of Italian expressiveness, tilts of the head, dazzling smiles, skeptical squints. He would have made a fine silent film actor. He wanted to know what I'd seen that impressed me, and with Chaz adding a little running commentary, we had a lovely, easygoing conversation about our favorites. It was as unforced as any coffee shop chat between two movie lovers. If I had been honest about what I'd seen at Sundance that impressed me most, I would have blurted, "You." I didn't tell Ebert how much his recent writing has meant to me. In the last couple of years, his output on the Chicago Sun-Times website (blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/) has ballooned. It seems like he's trying to fill up the Internet singlehanded. In addition to posting incisive, thought-provoking responses to a half dozen films or more each week, he's writing sharp, lengthy essays about food, life, science, society, philosophy and sex (Ebert lost his virginity in 1964 at the University of Minnesota, he recently wrote, and I think we should erect a plaque). He illuminates every subject he touches – ink and celluloid or flesh and guts -- with insight and knowledge. He shares his opinions about politics, which makes some readers cranky, but Ebert argues that writing criticism is about expressing your values, so why not be honest about where you stand on the issues of the day? I didn't tell Ebert how I admired his productivity in the face of his serious health issues. He has already shrugged off comments like that in print, saying that the energy that once went into speech now channels into writing. He has written that he's not dying any faster than you or I, so why should he get special attention for doing what he loves? The man writes voraciously. At this point in his career, he could relax and quietly fade from view, but that's alien to his nature. He's like an old star in supernova phase, throwing off more light toward the end, enlarging the space of what we can perceive. Even though nighttime is coming you get the feeling that Roger Ebert could talk forever.
