The Great Movies III

Not that Ebert disdains literary tradition; he is a voracious reader of fiction, history, and science (especially Darwinism), and he can deploy allusions with ease. But his frame of reference, I believe-so typical of the Movie Generation that emerged in the r96os-is that of films and filmmakers. From this perspective, movies are more than entertainment, more even than exalting or disturbing works of art. Taken in all their variety, films can shape our most fundamental feelings and guide us toward a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it. Movies constitute a shared culture, a kaleidoscopic filter through which life takes on fresh meanings. This is the sensibility that, in my opinion, forms the framework of the Great Movies collections.

Ebert would probably reply that he is centrally a journalist: tied to the moment, paced for deadlines, writing for people who want informed opinion about what's playing this weekend. But he'd have to admit that he has also written extended essays that were more than ephemeral "think pieces." The Great Movies anthologies go further, into the classic realm of the occasional essay, where the man of letters really gets to show his stuff.

The essays in all three volumes are belletristic in the best sense. A particular film is at once an artwork to be interpreted and an experience to be evoked on the page. Historical and personal background is smoothly integrated into a survey of key instants onscreen, and these are delineated with a crispness that can make your scalp prickle. This is appreciative, celebratory criticism at its best. Read one of these essays, and you want to see the film immediately, even if you've seen it many times before.

At the level of analytical commentary, Ebert can summon up a scene in a sentence. He has sharp eyes and ears. He notices details in the background of shots; he can specify a director's compositional strategies. (The rest of us have to use frame stills.) He cuts to the heart of a movie by quoting a line. In Rebel Without a Cause, everybody remembers the moment when James Dean cries out to his bickering parents: "You're tearing me apart!" But we remember it because it's a cliche. Ebert reminds us of what follows, a more eccentric line that mirrors Jim's adolescent confusion: "You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again." And this detail moves Ebert into considered reflection on how this scene and others like it open onto a malaise that goes deeper than i95os suburban discontent, a glimpse of an existential doubt that life itself means anything.

This yawning uncertainty yields a movie that is compelling in its (probably unintentional) disjunctions. "Like its hero, Rebel Without a Cause desperately wants to say something and doesn't know what it is. If it did, it would lose its fascination." Ebert is alert to such tensions, finding them in The Big Red One, The Red Shoes, The Scarlet Empress, and other classics. Along with celebrating formal perfection, Ebert acknowledges that ambitious films often unleash impulses that they can't contain. The discordances demand that we think through the implications of what we're seeing.

Again and again, then, powerful ideas arise from Ebert's exploration of the world offered onscreen. He assumes that a great film will, directly or tacitly, raise permanent concerns about love, trust, moral commitment, and death. Most obviously, there are the Bergman films, which always put ultimate issues at their center. These tease Ebert into some of his most eloquent writing. "The events in Fanny andAlexander may be seen through the prism of the children's memories, so that halfunderstood and halfforgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives."

Likewise, Welles has never shirked a chance to explore issues of deep concern to human life. For Ebert, Chimes at Midnight is not only a supreme work of Welles's late years; it's also an autobiographical testament and a meditation on power and loyalty. For Ebert, Welles treats Shakespeare's play as setting Falstaff's unsparing vitality against the compromises of political responsibility.

But less solemn work stirs Ebert to thought as well. Groundhog Day, which seems to be admired by every person I sit beside on a plane, provokes Ebert to some unique observations. Bill Murray, he points out, not only makes the film wonderful: "He does a more difficult thing, which is to make it bearable." Ebert goes on to describe the actor's "detached melancholy": "He is deeply suspicious of joy, he sees sincerity as a weapon that can be used against him ... Hamlet in a sitcom world." From this Ebert moves smoothly to contemplate the film as "a parable for our materialistic age," an anti-New Age vision of a spirituality that doesn't come easily. Instead of a happy ending, the film offers a hero who remains flawed: "He becomes a better Phil, not a different Phil."