The movie Roger Ebert “detested so much” it caused an existential crisis: “The problem is possibly with me”
In theory, film criticism shouldn’t cause an existential crisis. The job is simple: somebody watches a movie and then shares their insight, analysis, and overall thoughts, for better or worse. And yet, Roger Ebert abhorred one coming-of-age romance so deeply that he began to question himself.
That’s an unusual effect for a picture to have on anyone who makes a living reviewing the latest releases, never mind a guy who was inarguably the most famous critic of his era and possibly of all time. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like it either, but Ebert’s disdain ran so deep that it sounded an awful lot like he needed a period of quiet reflection to recover.
It wasn’t even a particularly deep, challenging, or complex movie. Co-written and co-directed by Steven Kampmann and William Porter (using the pseudonym of Will Aldis), 1988’s Stealing Home was a relatively by-the-numbers tale that ticked all of the required boxes associated with the genre.
Mark Harmon’s failed baseball player is wracked with guilt and grief after discovering that Jodie Foster’s Katie Chandler, his childhood sweetheart, committed suicide. The impact she’d made on his life throws him into an existential crisis of his own, forcing him to return to his hometown to enact her wishes of having him be the one to scatter her ashes.
The narrative jumps between the present day and flashbacks to the 1960s, exploring the pair’s relationship as youngsters, with Harmon’s Billy Wyatt also forced to reckon with his own lingering childhood trauma. So far, so standard, and for whatever reason, enough to send Ebert spiralling.
“The problem is possibly with me,” he wrote in a one-star review. “I detested Stealing Home so much from beginning to end that I left the screening wondering if any movie could possibly be that bad. Never mind the hoots and catcalls from others in the preview audience; they had their own problems.”
Ebert made it clear that not only did he utterly despise the film, but he couldn’t wrap his head around why it gained such an enthusiastic response from the gathered masses, making him begin to wonder if he was the only person who couldn’t get on board with the sentimental and saccharine flick.
“I resolved to sit in a quiet place and run through the movie once again in my mind,” he said. “Trying to see through its paralysing sincerity to the intelligence, if any inside.” That didn’t quite work, with the critic going on to lambast Stealing Home for being so laughably self-serious that it bordered on parody.
“Stealing Home is a real squirmer, a movie so earnest and sincere and pathetic and dripping with pathos that it cries out to be satirised,” he explained. “The only way to save this movie would be a new soundtrack with savagely cynical dialogue over the sappy images.”
He didn’t find it “accessible, comprehensible or interesting” in the slightest, but because the others in his preview screening did, Ebert was left to wonder if it was his fault and not the filmmakers’ that he hated it so passionately.
