Something Wilder
Mas ter of the deadp an , master of the meltdown, master of the sly, knowing look: Gene Wilder’s face and voice are part of our generation’s consciousness. We can’t think of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without thinking of Gene Wilder’s cinematic version of the tall-hatted inventor first. Lines from that 1971 film — which fared so poorly with critics yet lived on so fondly in people’s memories — still rest on the tips of our tongues, audio cues at the ready, complete with Wilder’s crystalclear delivery: “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
But we first encounter Wilder on film, chronologically, in 1967’ s Bonnie
and Clyde. There, it’s not just an up-andcoming Gene Hackman we notice — the rowdy Barrow brother telling the joke about the family cow — but the unfortunate young man and his young lady sitting in the backseat, abducted for a joy ride after Wilder takes issue with the bank robbers trying to steal his car.
And it’s not just the ease with which the young couple become enmeshed with “The Barrow Gang” — drinking and joking along the 1930s roadways — but also the way Wilder and his lady companion are instantly ditched after Wilder casually mentions that he’s an undertaker. The young actor’s face reveals the true gamut of expression: from acceptance to shock to exile in an instant.
Wilder’s haunted blue eyes could lend either deep serenity or edgy panic to any role: the calm, cool gunslinger of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, or the manic, slow-burning Dr. Frankenstein in Young
Frankenstein; the nebbishy neurotic Leo Bloom in The Producers, or the perfect, bushy- haired foil to Richard Pryor’s race-baiting character in Silver Streak and Stir Crazy.
There was always something of the mad scientist to Wilder, in the unpredictability of his responses: “I’m hysterical! I’m hysterical!” he screams, bug-eyed, at Zero Mostel in The Producers (1968), until Mostel throws a vase of water in his face. “I’m hysterical! And I’m… wet! I’m…
wet!” comes the new pitch of his hysteria. We can easily see some of that hysterical pitch in latter-day actors like Paul Dano, whose Eli in P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood seems like an homage to Wilder’s teetering edge, his willingness to plunge over it; there’s a bit of Wilder’s wide-eyed expressiveness, too, in Johnny Depp’s turn as a Z-list director in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Wilder himself was a devotee of Chaplin, Buster Keaton — those silent comedians who could say so much without saying a word.
Watch Wilder play off his sheep love interest in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex from 1972: there’s a dewy fondness in his eyes that would be creepy if it wasn’t played as pure farce. See him take on the laconic role of The Waco Kid in Brooks’ groundbreaking Western comedy, Blazing Saddles (a comedy that Seth McFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West cribbed shamelessly while still failing to reach its absurd heights). See him hide behind a tree as The Fox in Stanley Donen’s
The Little Prince, his eyes shifting and darting, his hands imitating paws. Or see him relish the role of Dr. Frankenstein in a concept he first pitched to Brooks (“Cute. Very cute,” the director replied), employing his best slow burns B and double-takes and comic timing. ut the one role we all love, the one we can never quite figure out, is his Willy Wonka. Seeing the movie as a kid, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was simply a cavalcade of catchy songs, funny lines, and candy fantasies. Seeing it later, as an adult, you can’t get over the cruelty of Wonka: his trickery, his ironic tone, his underlying contempt for mankind. “The suspense is terrible,” Wonka whispers breathlessly at one point. “I hope it lasts.” Wilder delivers half his lines as a tired, going-through-the-motions candy impresario, desperate for some amusement, or for something that surprises him in the lucky children gathered together in his factory. The other half of his lines are tart rebukes, ironic zingers or lacerating displays of wit meant to show up the parents, as well as the children, as numbskulls. He’s hard to like, yet he runs the show. It’s a puzzling, mesmerizing performance — and none of it seems lifted from the Dahl book. All of it seems to emanate from Wilder’s peculiar immersion in the role. All those deadpan pauses and doubletakes are meant to make us question Wonka up until his very last dirty trick: informing Charlie and his Uncle that they’ve been disqualified for eating unauthorized candy: “You lose! Good day, sir!”
That he swiftly does a 180, allowing us a happy ending, doesn’t take away from that weird, unnerving performance — one that Depp’s odd interpretation in Tim Burton’s remake couldn’t even get near. We understand Wilder’s Wonka, finally: he is a displeased God. No wonder he’s cranky, bored and out for blood.
Wilder understood that double edge. His comedies walked along it in the early ’70s. He finally settled into less edgy fare by the ‘80s, making very popular comedies with another master of the double-take, Richard Pryor, and lesspopular ones with his wife Gilda Radner — though these lacked the knife-like quality of his early screen work. He was still very funny, though; still a master of facial takes; still very much Gene Wilder.