Page 29 - Boca ViewPointe - October '24

October 2024 Viewpointe, Page 29
Film Review…

Remembering Gene Wilder: A Documentary

By Nils A. Shapiro and ran into Wilder enough, amid the many laughs inspired by brief clips of
in a restaurant the several of these films I shed a tear or two as well. Despite
Almost 20 years ago I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, physical image I had all the wonderful humor that was his gift to us, for Gene
Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, the of him from those Wilder himself all of life’s success was nothing to laugh at
memoir written by actor, writer and director Gene Wilder, films was shattered in the end. With all his comedic genius, he died on August
who in those pages came across as one of the sweetest, when I realized that 29th, 2016 at the age of 83 as the result of complications
gentlest and just plain nicest human beings ever to have he was actually quite from Alzheimer’s.
graced the American theater and screen. handsome in person, Interestingly, although one of the most appealing
Like millions of others I had for many years enjoyed his eyes a piercing aspects of this documentary is the fact that Wilder himself
his performances as a vulnerable, zany, hilarious comedian blue.) narrates the story of his childhood and start in show
in such films as: Young Frankenstein; Blazing Saddles; Having enjoyed business. Yet the actual production of the film did not
The Producers; The Woman in Red; The Frisco Kid; Willy his memoir, when I begin until years after Wilder’s death. It turns out the
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and others–and paired noted in late August narration used in the documentary was picked up from
with Richard Pryor in See No Evil, Hear No Evil and the release of this the one Wilder had made for the audiobook version of
Silver Streak. (I should add that after I had moved from documentary of his his 2005 memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, and works
New York to Los Angeles in 1981 as a magazine publisher life on Netflix, I was drawn to it immediately and, sure seamlessly here together with the film’s scenes of Wilder’s
growing-up years in a middle-class Milwaukee Jewish
family and his first big break when Mel Brooks’s wife,
Anne Bancroft, tells her husband she suggests the young
Wilder be hired for a role in her Broadway play.
Gene Wilder had been born with the last name of
Silberman. As a young boy he was told by his father that
his mother had a serious heart condition, could not bear
any stress, and that it was important for the boy to try
instead to make his mother laugh as much as possible.
That was the moment and motivation that set the boy on
his life path. As he later relates, “I didn’t think the name
Silberman seemed right for the job. I wanted to be wilder!”
And that is how the rest of the world came to know and
love him.
Among those who appear in this film to discuss the
Gene Wilder they knew are his widow, Karen Wilder, Mel
Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Dick
Cavett, producer Mike Medavoy and Ben Mankiewicz,
among others.
It is all here, in this documentary: his loves—which
included an earlier marriage to the Saturday Night Live
comedienne Gilda Radner, and tragic loss of her to
cancer—and his extraordinary successes as an actor,
writer and director. Now this documentary of his life has
won numerous awards, among the most recent the Best
Documentary Feature at the 2024 Boca International
Jewish Film Festival.
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