My favorite writer: Two years without Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert died April 4, 2013.

Sometimes, I feel a little silly telling people that my favorite writer was a film critic. Not Charles Dickens or Henry David Thoreau or Richard Yates – though they are all great – but Chicago movie writer Roger Ebert. Of course, those of us who read Ebert’s work every week and hung on his every word know that he was much more than a film critic. He was a life critic, someone who could see the logic and the flaw in any argument and always sought to be on the side of right, whatever that was.

He died two years ago today, and each day since, it has been difficult not to feel that I am missing something valuable from my life. His longtime colleague and friend Richard Roeper spoke for all of us last year on the first anniversary of Ebert’s death when he said: “What would Roger say? What would Roger write? What would Roger’s take be? Those thoughts cross my mind nearly every time I exit a screening.”

No one can speak for Ebert. I certainly cannot, but there are a few things I am sure of. He would have loved 12 Years a Slave. As a fan of Michael Apted’s fabulous Seven Up series, he would have been floored by Boyhood. He would be just as excited as the rest of us to see Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating passion project Silence finally make it to screens this year. I feel certain of these things, but damn, I wish he were around to write about them.

His work expanded on the Internet from film reviews to blog posts and other columns, and so did the scope of his interests. As much as I loved his reviews and his television show – At the Movies was appointment viewing when I was in high school – I lived for his columns on spirituality, gun violence, and American culture at large. Growing up, I never wanted to be anything other than a writer, and Ebert’s columns showed me all the different things being a writer could mean. It means being observant, honest, optimistic, and most of all compassionate.

Ebert is not my favorite writer because I think he is the best, although I would put his simple, elegant prose alongside any of the giants of English literature. No, he is my favorite because he is the one who makes me love what I do and makes me want to keep doing it. There is nothing in this life I am more suited to than writing, and it was Ebert whose work convinced me this pursuit could be more than words on a page. He showed me this could be important and valuable, and I don’t think we can ask too much more of our heroes.

I have told my Roger Ebert story before. You can read it in my review of director Steve James’ great documentary on Ebert, Life Itself, which is on Netflix Instantwatch now, by the way. So, rather than retell that, I thought I would share some of his work that influenced me most and most changed the way I think about movies and about life. Click on any of the below links to go and read the piece.

A Leave of Presence

The Great Movies: La Dolce Vita

O, Synecdoche, My Synecdoche!

In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye

Ending Up in a Kind of Soundlessly Spinning Ethereal Void As We All Must

How I Believe in God

Gatsby Without Greatness

Thank you, Roger, for all of it. I only wish there were more, but I guess the same could be said about this whole crazy life of ours.

New movie review: While We’re Young

Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller play a middle-aged married couple in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young.

In each stage of adult life, it seems we must pose ourselves a question. Early on, it is: What am I supposed to do? Then, it becomes: What am I going to do? That is followed by: What am I am doing? Finally, for all of us, it ends with: What have I done? The progression is as natural as the life cycle of a salmon, and every one of us is swimming upstream in search of the answers.

The opening moments of While We’re Young depict a middle-aged married couple completely baffled by taking care of a newborn baby. The woman begins to tell a fairytale, which seems to soothe the child, but as she forgets the basic details of the story, the happy, familial narrative falls apart, as does she when the child starts to cry. The husband is at a loss and has no help to offer. Then, the child’s actual parents come running in, and the stage is set for the couple’s joint midlife crisis.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has always specialized in upper-middle-class angst in such films as The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg. His last film, Frances Ha, was a marked departure, full of youthful energy and refreshing joie de vivre. In While We’re Young, Baumbach tries to blend the two approaches, but it becomes pretty apparent where his sympathies lie.

The ever-versatile Naomi Watts joins a toned down Ben Stiller as Cornelia and Josh, a childless couple whose friends all seem to have moved on to the child-rearing phase of life and left them behind. It is as relatable a concept as Baumbach has yet tried, and Watts and Stiller find a neat balance of hurt and self-delusion in their characterizations.

After realizing they are not on the same wavelength as their friends who are new parents, they return home and discuss how happy they are with their lives and how, without children, they are free to pick up and leave on a European vacation any time they please. Well, they would obviously need time to plan, they reason, and of course, they have not traveled anywhere in eight years, but the point is that any time they want to go, they can. Nothing is tying them down.

In truth, they are deep in denial. Maybe they do want a child. They have tried before, and Cornelia miscarried. She is unwilling to go through that experience again. At the same time, Josh is a documentary filmmaker who showed promise when he was young but has spent the last 10 years working on the follow-up to his first movie. Just as they begin to face some hard questions about their lives – namely: What am I doing? (see above) – something comes along to distract them.

The distraction is another couple, Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver (Girls, Tracks) and Amanda Seyfried (Chloe). They are young, wild, and full of life in all the ways Cornelia and Josh are not. For Cornelia, they represent an attractive alternative to her middle-aged friends’ baby talk and, in a standout sequence, their mommy-and-me-type music classes. For Josh, it is something much more specific. In Jamie, a budding documentarian himself, Josh sees all the potential he never fulfilled.

So, Josh and Cornelia revert to the extended adolescence embodied by the younger couple, and they spend their time doing drugs, going to parties, and eating homemade ice cream. Josh marvels at how these kids are constantly creating things, an impressive feat to a man who has spent a decade working on a single film. What no one ever stops to ask is whether the things they create – art, film, ice cream, etc. – have value.

This question, perhaps more than any other, will be key to understanding the current generation of 20-somethings, who are all asking themselves what they are supposed to do and what they are going to do, and Baumbach puts it right at the heart of his movie. Due to the unprecedented economic successes of their parents and grandparents, those people just becoming adults now have more opportunities and options for how to spend their lives than any previous generation in history. They will be defined by how they waste or embrace those chances.

At about the midway point of the film, Baumbach and editor Jennifer Lame piece together a brilliant montage of the two couples going about their separate lives. Jamie and Darby listen to classical music on vinyl records and watch VHS copies of crummy ‘50s sci-fi movies, while Josh watches The Daily Show on his phone, and Cornelia listens to pop music on Spotify and plays games on her iPad. The joke is that young people like old things. We might call them hipsters, but the implications are far more insidious than that.

I think we are at a point in our shared cultural dialogue where we can admit a few things. Vinyl records are cumbersome and limiting. VHS tapes have terrible picture quality. New music is fine, and cell phones have broadened the possibilities of communication beyond anything we ever thought possible. By not embracing new technology, Jamie and Darby – and the segment of their generation they represent – are effectively rejecting the opportunities progress affords them.

Early in their friendship, the four of them are having a discussion when one of them brings up a snack they all love but to which they cannot recall one of the key ingredients. They try to remember for a moment, then Josh goes to his phone to check online. He is stopped by Jamie, who says, “Let’s just not know.” He then sits back and smiles. It is a clear renunciation of the Information Age. Just about anything one could want to learn is at his fingertips, but Jamie would rather not know.

The film is not an indictment of either couple as Baumbach has never made a movie that simplistic. Instead, it is a contrast of the ways people from different generations approach their lives. There is a happy medium between analyzing our lives to the point of tedium and shutting out reality to the point of ignorance. As Josh and Cornelia work toward that medium and Jamie and Darby resist it, the point becomes clear. Asking questions is great while we are young, but as we get older, it becomes equally important to find the answers.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Director Alex Gibney's new documentary Going Clear seeks to expose the lies behind Scientology.

“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.” – Linus in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I promise not to discuss the Great Pumpkin in this space.

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney is a masterful storyteller and a remarkable investigator who often spins riveting tales about true-life atrocities. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is firmly in the mold of his previous films such as the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It is a frightening and infuriating film, one from which you will not be able to turn away.

I am a great admirer of Gibney’s craft, and as a journalist, his research is impeccable. Going Clear had its worldwide debut less than 72 hours ago on HBO – though its premier was at the Sundance Film Festival in January – and the Church of Scientology has already tried to steal the headlines with its refutation of the facts presented in the film. The organization has started numerous websites and created countless satellite Twitter accounts all to mitigate the damage it believes this film will do to it. For a group that already has severe public relations problems, it is hard to blame the Church of Scientology for this reaction.

The film centers on two questions, one a matter of fact and the other a matter of interpretation. First, did the Church of Scientology use mental and physical abuse to control and contain its members? It will say it did not, though no current leaders or members of the Church of Scientology agreed to be interviewed for the film. The former members, including Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) and actor Jason Beghe (Chicago P.D. and X-Men: First Class), say mental and physical abuse was not only routine but a matter of policy.

It comes down to agenda. The Church of Scientology will do anything in its immense power to protect its business, while the filmmakers and interview subjects want to expose the organization as a massive, dangerous fraud. As the people whom Gibney interviews, including several former high-ranking members of the group, do not stand to benefit from knowingly making themselves the targets of a public smear campaign, I am inclined to believe their version of events.

So, if we accept as fact that the Church of Scientology engaged in a top-down program of systematic abuse, what do we do with that information? Similar charges and worse have been brought against the Catholic Church, and the results have been more or less the same. The accused organization denies any wrongdoing, suggests its accusers are lying or unreliable, and pays out an undisclosed settlement to bury its problems in money.

Ah, yes, the money. This brings us to the second question: Is the Church of Scientology a religion, and if so, does it deserve tax-exempt status from the government? For now, the IRS recognizes the Church of Scientology – which is worth billions of dollars – as a religion, and it does not owe taxes to the federal government.

Leaving aside how the organization achieved this status, which Gibney dissects at length in the film, the larger issue is whether something like the Church of Scientology constitutes a religion. One of the interview subjects says that part of the problem is putting that decision in the hands of the IRS. He says they are accountants and lawyers, not theologians, which is true to an extent, but when it comes to discussing far-out beliefs and perceived cults, don’t we all become amateur theologians?

Much is made publicly and in the film of the Church of Scientology’s beliefs, which include distant planets, ancient souls, and space aliens. If it sounds like an organization started by a science-fiction writer, that is because founder L. Ron Hubbard was in fact a science-fiction writer. However, I refuse to participate in a discussion in which these facts are used as the basis for dismissing the possibility of Scientology as a religion.

The Church of Scientology may be the new kid on the block, but I fail to see its beliefs in past lives and space pods as more ludicrous than a burning bush, reincarnation, or the parting of the Red Sea. It is too easy, particularly in a Christian-Protestant-centric nation such as the U.S., to look down on belief systems we find strange or out of touch. It is much safer to hold others up for scrutiny than to engage in serious, meaningful self-reflection.

Are the Church of Scientology’s abuses horrid? Yes, unforgivably so, but they are on par with the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse and basically every major religion’s shameful treatment of women. Does the organization deserve tax-exempt status? Absolutely not, and neither does any religion in a nation that values the separation of church and state.

Going Clear works as a stunning exposé of a corrupt organization run by an out-of-control power structure. The unfortunate circumstance is the people most in need of this information will never see it – those inside Scientology. For those of us outside the organization, there is nothing in the film not available to those curious enough to seek it out. Gibney’s film may shock you in its compilation of the details, but that is not its primary value. At its best, Going Clear will engage you with questions about the nature of belief systems and what happens when you realize your system is a fraud.

See it? Yes.