HBO’s two-part Mel Brooks documentary blends comic highlights with melancholy

HBO’s two-part, three-and-a-half-hour documentary “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,” directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, premieres Thursday night on HBO and pairs the pleasure of revisiting Brooks’s work with a persistent thread of sorrow. The film is an exhaustive look at Brooks’s life and art, prompting big laughs from clips of The Producers and Blazing Saddles while also reflecting on his longevity and the loneliness of being one of the last of a generation.

In interviews with Apatow, Brooks downplays how risky and groundbreaking his satire was and insists that getting laughs was always his primary goal. The title — a riff on Brooks and Carl Reiner’s routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” — traces well-known highs and lesser-known lows: Brooks is portrayed as a perpetual underdog who felt washed up in the early 1960s and was often disparaged by critics.

The documentary devotes extensive time to his long romance with Anne Bancroft, who died in 2005, and his deep friendship with Carl Reiner, who died in June 2020. Part 2 emphasizes loss and loneliness, opening with a humorous bit about Brooks’s morning mental exercises before shifting into a more profound sadness, aided by new interviews with colleagues he has outlived, including David Lynch, Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner.

Key Topics

Culture, Mel Brooks, Hbo, Judd Apatow, Michael Bonfiglio, Anne Bancroft