PLOT: The life and career of Gene Wilder are remembered by his friends and colleagues.
REVIEW: Gene Wilder was a one-of-a-kind talent. While it seems like he’s mostly remembered these days for playing Willy Wonka (with his performance inspiring Timothee Chalamet’s recent take), there was a lot more to him than just that one film. For one thing, his cinematic partnership with Mel Brooks resulted in three all-time classics: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Plus, he and Richard Pryor made an iconic mismatched duo in a slew of films (some better than others), while Wilder directed several highly successful films on his own.
In this loving tribute to the late icon, director Ron Frank pulls back the curtain to dip into both Wilder’s creative process and sometimes tragic life. Pulling from an audiobook he recorded of his memoirs, the film is distinguished because Wilder himself tells much of the story. If you’ve read his book or seen enough of the movies he had a creative hand in (which was most of his films), you’ll know that Wilder was an eternal optimist. It’s gratifying to hear here, through a telling interview with his widow Karen Wilder, that even during his years-long battle with Alzheimer’s, he mainly remained upbeat. She notes that one of the curious blessings of the disease was that by the time he was diagnosed, he was already quite far along in its course, so he was spared some of the grief that comes with an early diagnosis and was never too aware of the fact that he was slipping away.
Most of Wilder’s living colleagues are interviewed here, including the still-spry Mel Brooks, who tearfully remembers Wilder as one of his best friends and breaks down at the memory of his friend’s final days. The film is careful to note the near symbiotic relationship the two had, with them building off each other’s success. Brooks (and his late wife Anne Bancroft) discovered Wilder, giving him a star-making role in The Producers. But, when Brooks had a disaster on the set of Blazing Saddles with the actor initially hired to play The Waco Kid, Wilder up and quit the film he was working on to fly directly to the set and play the part (to perfection). The movie notes that Young Frankenstein was their baby, with Wilder and Brooks co-writing the film. That movie’s success spawned Wilder’s career as a writer-director with The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, The World’s Greatest Lover, and more (he had a massive hit with The Woman in Red in 1984).
For the most part, the film is a love fest, with no one having a bad word to say about Wilder. In later years, he became famous for his on-screen partnership with the volatile Richard Pryor, starring in two stone-cold classics, Silver Streak and Stir Crazy. Much was made about how the men, offscreen, weren’t that close, Pryor’s daughter says that during their last two films, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You, her father was desperately ill with multiple sclerosis, and Wilder always supported him and tried to make life easier for his co-star, something which Pryor always appreciated. Thus, their partnership ended on a note of mutual respect despite their ups and downs.
The movie also dips into Wilder’s tragic romance with the brilliant Gilda Radner, who died of cancer just a few years after they were married. The film also tracks the happy marriage he had in his latter years with a speech therapist for deaf people that he hired to help him on See No Evil, Hear No Evil (where he played a deaf man). Indeed, Wilder seemed like a one-of-a-kind man, being one of the few Hollywood icons without any real skeletons in his closet. It’s nice to know that Wilder was as special off-screen as on-screen.