Remembering Gene Wilder — as mensch, mad genius and the only Wonka who matters
Gene Wilder on the set of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar March 11, 2024
In Paul King’s unnecessary origin story Wonka, Timothée Chalamet, playing the titular chocolatier, plants his signature cane in a brick courtyard. Walking downstairs, Chalamet skips steps, or suddenly ascends a few. It’s a rare kind of choreography, replicating a famously unpredictable performance, but it’s clear to anyone that something is missing: the mania or, rather, the barely contained rage that Gene Wilder accessed in his greatest roles.
Remembering Gene Wilder, a new documentary premiering March 15, parts the curtain on Wilder’s process. He was the one who dreamed up Wonka’s original iconic entrance, in which his cane snags on a flagstone and he, letting go of a phony limp, bursts forth in a somersault for the visitors of his factory. In the scene at Wonka’s office — where everything is improbably sawed in half — Wilder’s own anger animated his dressing down of a young Charlie Bucket (and an older Grandpa Joe).
Chalamet — who tried and failed to pull off the forward roll — can’t be faulted too much for missing Wonka’s thunderclouds. In interviews and clips from Wilder’s audiobook memoir, we learn that the anger sprung up from a unique admonishment.
When he was a child, a doctor told Wilder (then Jerome Silberman) to never argue with his mother, who had a heart condition. “Try to make her laugh,” he said.
Wilder took to the task with aplomb, but the approach had its drawbacks.
“‘Don’t ever argue with your mother’ inhibited me from getting angry with anyone, holding it all in and that’s poison,” Wilder said. “I felt a rage that I didn’t and couldn’t express except through acting.”
But, for Mel Brooks, at least in the beginning, it wasn’t Wilder’s latent fury that drew him — it was a guileless innocence that made him the perfect foil to Zero Mostel in The Producers. (Wilder became so dependable to Brooks that he was brought in with a day’s notice to replace Gig Young in Blazing Saddles.)
Interviewing Brooks, Willy Wonka director Mel Stuart, Wilder’s costars, friends (he and Harry Connick, Jr. were close apparently) and his widow, Karen Boyer, we see an element of bashert in Wilder’s career, the alternative to which is framed in psychiatric terms.
Wilder says that had Jerome Robbins not “miscast” him in a Broadway run of Mother Courage, he wouldn’t have met its star, Anne Bancroft. “If I hadn’t met Anne Bancroft, I wouldn’t have met Mel Brooks. If I hadn’t met Mel Brooks, I would probably be some patient at some neuropsychiatric hospital today, looking through the bars of a physical therapy window as I made wallets.”
Wilder knew something of mental illness. In the army, he was stationed in a hospital, where he witnessed soldiers going through psychotic episodes.
“I saw their behavior — I thought that was the closest to acting that would help me later on,” he said.
Of course it did. Wonka and Wilder’s own creation of Young Frankenstein‘s Victor Frankenstein are iconic for how they spill over from equanimity to explosions of pure wrath. (As Brooks says, “He’s sweet, simple and honest — but when he got excited he was a volcano”). Together these roles are the apogee of Wilder’s creative genius, but the documentary, directed by Ron Frank, takes a more holistic approach.
The marvel of the film, which elides Wilder’s first two marriages and anything untidy about his personal life, is in how it makes you appreciate even some of his career lowlights.
No one’s particularly fond of Sidney Poitier’s Hanky Panky, a 1982 film where Wilder plays a guy named Michael Jordan — the same year someone else by that name made a game-winning jump shot in an NCAA championship. But many adored the forgettable comedy’s upshot: Wilder’s eventual marriage to co-star Gilda Radner.
The documentary places Wilder’s buddy comedies with Richard Pryor, a decidedly mixed bag, in their proper context. Although 1989’s See No Evil, Hear No Evil, where Wilder played a deaf man and Pryor is blind, came out to dismal reviews, its groan-worthy concept was apparently undertaken with a great deal of care. Wilder researched his role at the New York Center for the Hard of Hearing. (It was there he met his fourth wife, three years after the tragic passing of Radner from ovarian cancer.)
If Wilder’s homage to silent film, 1977’s The World’s Greatest Lover, was more a flop than a hit, it gave us the ongoing gift of Carol Kane’s comedic career. Just off an Oscar nomination for Hester Street, she was waiting for the phone to ring; Wilder was astute enough to see that Kane could be funny and the world is better for it.
Remembering Gene Wilder, which deals candidly with Radner’s eating disorder and cancer and Wilder’s dementia, reminds fans that he was a singular talent.
He was a man who could sell the premise of falling in love with a sheep, play an Orthodox rabbi in the Old West and toggle effortlessly from a soulful rendition of “Pure Imagination” to the sheer insanity of a psychedelic boat ride down a chocolate river.
And so it’s not fair to hold any actor to Wilder’s example. He was sui generis. He made us all laugh, just like the doctor ordered.
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