Fifty-something film music composer Calista looks back on her youth when, in the summer of 1977, she worked on the Billy Wilder movie Fedora and got to know the personable director.
I know - from the summary above you can tell it’s not a plot-heavy novel! But Jonathan Coe’s latest, while not as great as his last couple books have been, was a fairly interesting mix of fiction and non-fiction.
The way Coe wrote Wilder was easily the most enjoyable part of the book. He very masterfully brings to life someone I only know the name of - I’ve not seen any of his movies and, before I properly looked into this book, thought the novel was going to be about the actor Gene “Willy Wonka/Young Frankenstein” Wilder! - showing us his big personality, his wit and charm, warmth and intelligence. If a book isn’t going to be story-driven then its characters need to make up for that and Coe’s Wilder did just that.
It’s not just about the making of Wilder’s 1978 movie Fedora but also about his long and interesting life, starting out in Europe, finally selling a script to Hollywood, making his name there, and then coming back post-war and seeing the devastation of his homeland. And I think here is Coe’s main point of the book: about the difference between pre- and post-war film directors.
Wilder, in his autobiographical monologue (presented as a screenplay, which was a nice touch), talks about coming back to Europe after the war and being asked to put together reels and reels of footage taken from the Nazis’ concentration camps and, understandably, being shaken. Wilder’s known for his lighter movies and possibly dismissed at the time we first meet him - the late ‘70s - for not being as serious as the new wave of “bearded young men” like Scorsese and Spielberg.
Then he talks about trying to buy the rights to Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark, which was eventually adapted by Spielberg as Schindler’s List. But then Wilder says he wouldn’t have made as good a film as Spielberg anyway, and I think that’s because Wilder saw the raw footage of the Holocaust and was one of the first people to assemble it for presentation to the world. His reaction to such trauma was to keep it at arm’s length by making comedic, fun movies; Spielberg and the other post-war directors are able to so fully embrace darkness on film because they never had to face it in reality like Wilder did.
It’s a thoughtful point and, like the concept of this novel, makes me wonder what drove Coe to pursue it and turn it into this book. Movies have always been a feature of his novels so it’s not totally surprising but it’s still a strange choice. It is fascinating though to see a great public figure at the tail end of their career and life and seeing how they handle diminished fame and fortune.
The novel’s framing device of Calista in her 50s looking back is dull and makes for a slow entrance into the novel proper - I suppose it was needed to jump around in Wilder’s life to show him at different points after the Fedora shoot but it’s not terribly engrossing. Nor is much about Calista as a character - her film ignorance, her loves; eh, I didn’t care and her reciting film trivia word for word isn’t as funny as Coe thinks.
It’s also a very easy to put down book because there’s no real tension or overarching story that’s setting a pace and making you keep turning the pages. The Fedora shoot wasn’t dramatic or that special, though you learn that Wilder’s directing style was quite stiff - insisting that each word be read as it appears in the script with zero improvisation from the actor - which upset the lead actress in the early days of filming.
The book is very informative though. I knew nothing about Billy Wilder before reading it and now know a great deal about him both personally and professionally - and I’ll keep an eye out for his movies in the future and see what he was like as a visual storyteller.
Like the comparison of the two movies Calista goes to see towards the end of the book - Taxi Driver and The Shop Around the Corner - Mr Wilder and Me is not an exciting, dangerous story like Scorses’s masterpiece but more like the amiable and warm Ernst Lubitsch film, and deliberately so. Wilder loved Lubitsch and chose to make films like his - it’s fitting that Coe should write a novel about Wilder in the same vein.
And that’s what Mr Wilder and Me is: a thoughtful, pleasant read if not that compelling or memorable a narrative, with an excellent portrait of a larger-than-life film artist at its core. I liked it well enough but it’s not among Jonathan Coe’s best novels.
No comments:
Post a Comment