If you need a feel-good break, Ron Frank’s documentary Remembering Gene Wilder will do it. A Jewish actor, Wilder starred in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as well as such serious plays as Death of a Salesman and Rhinoceros. He did a brief comic turn in the still-shocking 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. Wilder is renowned for his films with Mel Brooks – he was spectacular in the original film of The Producers, and Young Frankenstein. As daring as Mel Brooks can be, Wilder had to persuade him to include the loony “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number with Peter Boyle as Frankenstein’s monster, the two of them dancing and singing in top hat and tails.
The people who talk about Wilder in the film – among them Harry Connick, Jr., Alan Alda and, of course Mel Brooks, have pretty much one-note praises for Wilder’s genius. Some real insight into Wilder’s career and brilliance would give the movie texture, but the clips are fabulous, and if the goal is to remember Gene Wilder, you don’t need more than these wonderful moments from a fine career.
On a different note, the documentary Mourning in Lod by Israeli/American filmmaker Hilla Medalia, is about the absurd, hideous symmetry in the endless conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The word “mourning” of the title refers to grief not sunrise.
During an Arab demonstration in the Israeli town of Lod, an Arab father named Musi is shot dead by an Israeli settler. At nearly the same time, an Israeli Jew, Yigal, is killed by a stone to the head thrown by an Arab. Yigal’s organs are harvested and his kidney saves the life of an Arab Christian woman. If you try to make clear sense of things from just these details, you will get a fraction of the dizziness of the situation. Filmmaker Hilla Medalia shows the strangling complications, but also little flickers of hope in the morass.
Neither of the murdered men were particularly religious or political, but, of course and unhappily, both political and religious rage rises to dominate events. Mourning in Lod was made before the bloody Hamas attack on Israel and the furious Israeli response in Gaza, but the film still presents a useful picture of animosity run amok.
Simone, Woman of the Century by French director and writer Olivier Dahan made me ashamed that I did not know about Simone Veil, who died in 2017. She was born in 1927 in Nice to a prosperous, secular Jewish family. Late in World War II, the Nazis captured her and in their panic as Allies and Russians were closing in, moved her around a number of concentration camps. Like all survivors, that she lived is a miracle.
Veil went on to become a lawyer. She worked to reform the French prison system; she eventually became the President of the European Parliament and Health Minister of France. She was a ferocious fighter for human rights and never let anyone forget that she’d been a Nazi prisoner, but as the movie shows, only in the service of human rights, and never to aggrandize herself.
In one remarkable moment, she helps lay the cornerstone for a monument. A French official is surprised that she knows how to spread the mortar, and is stunned when she says she learned the skill as a forced laborer for the Nazis.
Simone, Woman of the Century is a dramatic film, not a documentary, with wonderful historical sweep. It jumps around moments in Veil’s life to show how the Nazi period left her in painful fragments, but that this unique woman found a way to cement her life into a coherent whole.
The 28th Annual Denver Jewish Film Festival runs from March 9-17.
