REMEMBERING GENE WILDER - Mark Reviews Movies

Remembering Gene Wilder, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2024

More than anything, Remembering Gene Wilder wants to give us some comfort. Gene Wilder was and, for people who keep revisiting and new generations who are discovering his work almost a decade after his death, remains a beloved actor, a comedian who was as funny when he was quiet as when he was loud. More than that, he just seemed real and ordinary, no matter the character he played. Words that keep coming up when friends and colleagues describe Wilder in Ron Frank's documentary include "innocent," "naïve," and "gentle," and that's exactly what we want to hear about the man.

We hear a lot in Wilder's own words, too, about his life and career, from assorted interviews over the decades and from recited excerpts of his memoir. The story is usually the same: Something akin to fate always intervened when he needed it the most. His first big break was starring in The Producers, and that only happened because Wilder was in a soon-to-be closed stage production with Anne Bancroft, whose husband just happened to be an up-and-coming comedy writer named Mel Brooks. It's nice when things work out for people who deserve it, isn't it?

It's downright comforting, in fact, so we return to that idea as the driving force of this documentary. This isn't to suggest that Frank should have looked for some reason to distrust Wilder's public persona or find something about the man that would make us look at him in a lesser light, because no such quality of the actor seems to have existed by all accounts.

Brooks worked with him with fair regularity, as did Richard Pryor, whose daughter turns up here to explain that, despite their on-screen chemistry, her father and Wilder had an exclusively professional relationship that never became anything close to a friendship. This doesn't mean that they didn't have a lot of fun on set or that there wasn't some significance to the two men teaming up again after several years when Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By all these accounts, Wilder was a generous actor and human being, too, so if Pryor might have needed a bit of a career and personal boost as the daughter certainly suggests he did, who could be better to provide that than Wilder?

There are plenty of stories and sentiments like these in the movie, from all of the aforementioned people and more, such as Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., and some of Wilder's co-stars whose names aren't as familiar as those. They're all so kind, like when Peter Ostrum, who played the main kid in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, explains how Wilder treated him, not as a child, but as a fellow actor, despite it being his first (and only, by the way) performance in a movie.

These behind-the-scenes anecdotes are pleasant and often funny, especially when they come from Brooks. That's to be expected, of course, but the reason Brooks' contributions to the documentary are so enjoyable doesn't simply have to do with how well he tells stories of show business. It's because we can feel the love for his late friend in all of them.

Brooks spotted the exact qualities that would make Wilder such a unique screen presence pretty much from the start. Brooks fought for Wilder to stay in his first film. When an actor on Blazing Saddles had—let's call it—an episode on set, Brooks' mind instantly went to Wilder when he needed a quick sense of security. The two would laugh, and the way Brooks recalls the first time he heard his friend really guffaw at one of his jokes is the sort of memorial that no lengthy obituary could match. May we all have or be the kind of friend who remembers something like that.

The point is that Frank has made a documentary with a very lovely and loving mood about its subject, and at the start, it's really something to experience. Part of that is just the fateful nature of Wilder's career, as the actor himself explains that he becoming resigned to the notion of being a solid featured or supporting actor for the rest of his life, but then destiny and Brooks arrived. The behind-the-scenes stories are fun and insightful, and how much of that is simply because they're about two men at the height of their talents? Hearing stories of Wilder and Brooks' three collaborations together—the two previously mentioned comedies and Young Frankenstein—are going to work no matter what, because those films have stood the test of time.

The same can't quite be said of a lot of Wilder's other projects, which is fine since this is more a movie about an actor than the works in which he appeared. Still, we can feel the documentary stall as it searches for some way to frame Wilder's post-Brooks career, waiting for the other story that would define the man's legacy: his relationship with Gilda Radner, how he supported her through cancer, and the hole her death left in him.

Even that, though, is given a comforting angle here, and it's around this point that Remembering Gene Wilder reveals how shallow a biography it actually is. It certainly makes us feel good about Wilder's career and life, but that affection can only take such material so far.

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