Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! Review

The title is a joke about the 2000 Year Old Man and also a plain statement of fact, and the second reading is what gives the film its weight. This is the third of Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio's long documentaries about comedians, after the ones on Garry Shandling and George Carlin, and the first with its subject alive and in the room, which changes the whole shape of it. Brooks at ninety nine is not a monument being visited.

He interrupts, performs, rejects the setup he has been handed and then supplies a better one, and the film is smart enough to keep rolling when he does. Part one is the career: the writers room on Your Show of Shows, the decision to open a comedy with a song called Springtime for Hitler, Blazing Saddles surviving a studio that wanted half of it cut, and the odd second act as a producer where Brooks kept his own name off The Elephant Man so nobody would turn up expecting gags.

Part two is the losses, and the Anne Bancroft material is where the two halves stop being a clip reel. The talking heads are stacked, Stiller, Seinfeld, Sandler, Silverman, Reiner, Levinson, and several are there for the marquee rather than the insight. That is the real limit of it. This is a tribute and never a question, it barely engages with the weak late films, and across two parts it repeats itself. Reviewers were close to unanimous anyway, and so am I.