Over on Twitter, Alan Jacobs made a comparison that at first seemed odd but actually makes quite a bit of sense. He wrote:
Maybe it’s from all these years reading @gruber, but Ebert seems to have ascended at the same time and in the same way as Kubrick….
— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) April 4, 2013
… To hear many people tell it, neither of them ever put a foot wrong. But to me Ebert was just a pretty good critic, and Kubrick, while …
— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) April 4, 2013
… a truly great director, was not *uniquely* great (and not as great as, say, Jean Renoir) and made many mistakes. Anyway, I want to learn.
— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) April 4, 2013
When I reviewed the Stanley Kubrick exhibit currently underway at LACMA, I tried to briefly summarize why he is almost uniquely revered by so many film buffs:
Kubrick’s body of work straddles the art house and the mainstream. His work is provocative and thought provoking and excites the senses despite its frequently languid pace. Even as Kubrick traipses through cinematic neighborhoods that are popular with the people but less respected critically—"genre" fare like horror, sci-fi, noir—audiences experience an elevation of tone rarely seen in such pictures.
As I followed up on Twitter last night, Kubrick is an accessible auteur. Someone who is interested in the world of film beyond the latest multiplex offering can tackle his filmography without much trepidation: He's got something for everyone and his pictures, while complex enough in their own right, are by and large easily understood and easily enjoyed.* One isn't likely to go from GI Joe: Retaliation to Rules of the Game. But one might go from GI Joe: Retaliation to Full Metal Jacket to Paths of Glory to Rules of the Game.
For many, Ebert was a similar gateway drug. Ebert wasn't a populist exactly but, like Kubrick, he treated the sort of mainstream fare that "real people" love fairly. He was a generous critic, someone who understood that Wes Craven is working in a different milieu and has different goals than Steven Spielberg. Being generous doesn't mean suspending your critical faculties; anyone who has read Ebert's famous pans knows that. It just means understanding audiences and intentions and talking smartly about film.
Those who never bothered to think about film in a smart way—those who didn't read Kael or Sarris or Macdonald or Agee—may have found themselves intrigued by this funny, sardonic, slightly tubby guy on their TV and picked up one of his collections. And then from there gone on to explore what, exactly, he meant when he wrote about things like "auteur theory." And who is this Kael lady he mentions? Ebert gave the curious the tools they needed to expand their horizons—he was as much a teacher as a critic.
This is why you saw yesterday's outpouring. It wasn't because the world has lost a great writer or a great thinker—if I'm picking up a random collection of reviews to read to pass the time, I'm probably choosing Anthony Lane's, honestly—but because we lost a teacher, a mentor.
*2001 excepted. I can understand why people don't get the Space Baby.