Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! is the third and, thus far, best of Judd Apatow and Mike Bonfiglio‘s multi-part HBO documentaries about legendary comics.
As excellent and insightful as The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling and George Carlin’s American Dream were, the filmmakers began chronicling their subjects posthumously, requiring extra effort to bring Shandling and Carlin’s respective voices to the screen in addition to their ample professional outputs.
Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!
The Bottom Line
As funny as you’re expecting, but wildly emotional, too.
Airdate: 8 p.m. Thursday, January 22, and Friday, January 23 (HBO)
Directors: Judd Apatow and Mike Bonfiglio
With The 99 Year Old Man!, Apatow and Bonfiglio — though only Apatow appears on-camera himself — are able to sit down with Mel Brooks, putting one of the best storytellers of his or any era in the spotlight, not for the first time and hopefully not for the last.
Brooks, still reflective and funny at 99, is a powerful presence, but the documentary’s gut punch comes as much from the people who have been so integral to his life who are no longer with us — from figures like Carl and Rob Reiner, who both sat for interviews, to indispensable loved ones including Norman Lear and the essential Anne Bancroft, whose absence is felt even if they’re present in ample archival footage.
That Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! is funny and well-sourced and thoughtfully composed isn’t surprising, but the emotional potency perhaps is. You’ll laugh at this two-part, nearly four-hour film; it’s also hard to avoid tears at multiple points, especially in the second part.
And why would you want to avoid? How many of us have laughed until we cried at Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein or even Spaceballs? This feels like an extension of that mirth, a summation of a life of tremendous achievement in which friendships and a 40-plus-year marriage might be more significant than all the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tonys.
Allowing Brooks to steer the documentary, Apatow and Bonfiglio are able to stick to a fairly strict chronology.
The first part goes from Brooks’ birth in Brooklyn in 1926 — the documentary’s title will, knock on wood, become outdated on June 28 — to his service in World War II, his Borscht Belt roots and his early collaborations with Sid Caesar. It covers that indelible early partnership with Carl Reiner and his push into filmmaking with The Producers up to Blazing Saddles. This chapter includes his first marriage and then the early days of his relationship with Bancroft.
The second part traces Brooks’ career from Young Frankenstein — yes, Brooks’ unparalleled 1974 is split in two — to the present day, when he’s going through what son Max describes as the fourth or fifth waves of his fame, with the return of Spaceballs, The History of the World and possibly, if the FX series moves forward, Young Frankenstein.
Although The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein probably get the most time and depth, the filmmakers make sure to touch, at least briefly, on most of Brooks’ credits, including films that were considered disappointments at the time and perhaps still are. That means that The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, Life Stinks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights get proper discussion. Only fans of Dracula: Dead and Loving It — I’m sure they exist somewhere — are likely to be disappointed.
Ample, or at least near-ample, time is given to Brooksfilms, the production company that brought The Elephant Man, Frances, My Favorite Year and The Fly to the screen; ditto the decorated Broadway musical adaptation of The Producers. Only fans of the musical stage version of Young Frankenstein — I’m less convinced they exist — are likely to be disappointed.
There is some dryness to the first hour of the documentary, which is mostly biographical background, delivered by Brooks, who traces the origins of his sense of humor, as well as the early adversity he faced as a low-paid writer on Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Brooks and his three children with Florence Baum, two appearing on-camera and one via audio, aren’t hesitant to discuss his bouts with depression and the reasons that first marriage failed.
The documentary hits a high gear when Brooks connects first with Carl Reiner and then, nearly a decade later, with Bancroft. The tracing of those two key relationships provides the heart of the documentary — especially the apparently countless appearances, both talk shows and filmed public events, at which Brooks either discussed those relationships or Reiner and Bancroft joined him. As unavoidably sad as it is to imagine Brooks’ sense of loss no longer having Bancroft or both Reiners, the doc is far more infused with the joy that came from their interactions over many decades. It’s a love letter to the relationships that you have if you’ve lived a good 99 years.
While Brooks is, as I said, about as sharp as one could dream to be at 99, he’s still 99; the stories, while recounted with cleverness and alacrity, don’t have quite the animation and physicality that they once did. The directors approach this minor limitation by using those copious Brooks appearances from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s almost in conversation with the current version.
The best stories are the ones that Brooks has told the most frequently, and there’s pleasure in watching Brooks at different ages telling different parts of those familiar tales, with different voices and different details arising in each era and each venue and each host with whom he’s speaking. Even better are the couples stories we’re able to hear through a he said/she said of Brooks and Bancroft over the years.
Is the 99-year-old Brooks remembering the actual events or remembering the stories as he loved to tell them? There’s something very sentimental in the blurring of that line.
When Brooks’ collaborators aren’t available to be interviewed, the directors have a solid repository of archival interviews with Gene Wilder and Blazing Saddles co-writer Richard Pryor. And as the movies and projects become more recent, we’re able to get new interviews with the likes of Cary Elwes, Daphne Zuniga, Dave Chappelle and the Broadway duo of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. Dick Cavett talks about the beer commercial he and Brooks recorded together and Jerry Seinfeld remembers the pleasure of witnessing Brooks and Carl Reiner’s nightly dinner ritual for an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Then there are just a few of the countless comics inspired by Brooks and company, whether it’s Sarah Silverman and Adam Sandler sharing the pride they felt in Brooks’ Jewishness, to people like Ben Stiller, Nick Kroll, Robert Townsend, Jerry and David Zucker, Peter Farrelly and more talking about what they learned from experiencing Brooks’ films. Oh and yes, David Lynch is here talking about the doors Brooks opened for him by picking the Eraserhead auteur to direct The Elephant Man.
The documentary captures what was political about Brooks’ work, what was boundary-breaking, what you couldn’t do today and what type of insight and sensitivity might allow one to do something comparably audacious.
But it’s the friendship with Carl Reiner and the marriage to Anne Bancroft that linger. The documentary was always going to be amusing, but it didn’t need to be quite so lovely.
