‘To the Wonder’: the last movie Roger Ebert ever reviewed
For the most part, movie critics don’t become brands. They’ve got a relatively simple job, all things considered, and it’s one that anyone with an internet connection can do whenever they want for any film they want through whatever avenue they choose to do it. However, Roger Ebert was always a cut above.
Alongside Pauline Kael, he’s one of arguably the two most famous critics in modern cinema history, or at least among those who stuck to their day jobs for anyone preparing to invoke François Truffaut. Ebert’s reviews weren’t necessarily crafted to appease the common consensus, but they always came from the heart.
He enjoyed plenty of the established classics, but he also had a fondness for plenty of pictures that didn’t deserve anywhere near as much praise as he gave them. On the other side of the coin, he also eviscerated countless great movies that placed him firmly in the minority of people who couldn’t get on board with what the director of the film in question was trying to do.
Ebert even got dragged into a couple of feuds throughout his career, with certain performers and filmmakers taking so much umbrage with his withering assessment of their latest work that they felt compelled to call him out on it. When they did, the response was usually as verbose as it was scathing.
The vaunted critic passed away from cancer in April 2013 at the age of 70, seven years after undergoing surgery that removed part of his lower jaw. He could no longer speak or eat normally, but he could still write. The last review published while he was still alive was for Andrew Niccol’s turgid romantic fantasy, the literary adaptation The Host, which wouldn’t have been a fitting way to bow out.
However, Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, an elegiac and melancholy drama that was as experimental as it was existential, definitely was. It was the last review Ebert ever wrote, and it was published just two days after his passing. Fortunately, he gave it passing marks, with some of his reflections carrying extra weight.
“Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelt out? Aren’t many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed?” he asked. “Aren’t many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realise they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn’t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?”
Signing off for what would be the last time, Ebert remarked that “there will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent, leaving audiences dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply.” Summing up his feelings and completely disagreeing with that sentiment, his musings on Malick are even more bittersweet, knowing he never reviewed another movie: “But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.”
