HBO documentary film “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” is alternatively funny and touching as looking into many ups and downs in the life and career of Mel Brooks, a legendary American entertainer who will soon be 100 years old in this month. Although he may be near the end of the last chapter of his life, Brooks remains witty and spirited as before, and his jolly presence holds our attention with a lot of amusement for more than 3 hours.

The first part of the documentary mainly focuses on Brooks’s early years before his filmmaking career. He was born to a Jewish family living in a Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City, and he gives us some funny anecdotes on how he entered entertainment business during his adolescent years. After being on a stage for the first time in front of a lot of audiences, he became more convinced that he wanted to be an actor, but then he was drafted to the US Army due to the World War II.

Not long after the war was over, Brooks came to work as a comedy writer under a famous TV comedian named Sid Caesar. Along with many other young talented comedy writers ranging from Neil Simon to Carl Reiner, he constantly provided a lot of comic materials to their boss’s popular TV show, and Caesar became his biggest defender – especially when Brooks later demanded a salary raise to their producer.

Around that time, Brooks married Florence Baum, who incidentally worked in Caesar’s TV show at that time. As they came to have three children between them, she became a housewife while Brooks busily kept advancing in his career, but their relationship eventually got quite strained due to the growing estrangement between them, and Brooks is quite frank about how much he was responsible for their subsequent divorce in 1962.

And things got worse for Brooks after the end of Caesar’s TV show. He found himself struggling again, but then he came across Anne Bancroft, who was already a very successful actress at that time. Thanks to his persistent romantic pursuit, he and Bancroft quickly fell in love with each other, and that was the beginning of their loving relationship which lasted more than 40 years. Even though she was more successful than him, Bancroft kept motivating Brooks more and more, and that eventually led him to a couple of significant highpoints for his career. After the considerable success of his TV comedy series “Get Smart”, he got an opportunity to make his first feature film “The Producers” (1967), which became an unexpected hit and then garnered him a Best Screenplay Oscar.

Right from “The Producers”, Brooks demonstrated his own comic style and sensibility. To him, anything can be comedy, and he did not hesitate at all in making jokes involved with very sensitive subjects including racism. No matter how vulgar his jokes can be, he was ready to, as he once said, rise below vulgarity, and that is the main source of good laughs for us. For example, you may roll your eyes as observing how much the two main characters of “The Producers” go low for their loony scam plan, but you cannot help but laugh when their plan later culminates to one of the most outrageously funny moments in the film.

Although his next film “The Twelve Chairs” (1970) was a critical/commercial failure, Brooks soon came back with two comic masterpieces to remember: “Blazing Saddles” (1974) and “Young Frankenstein” (1974). While the former is a truly anarchistic (and vulgar, of course) parody on old western films, the latter is a seemingly serious but ultimately hilarious homage to Frankenstein movies, and they surely demonstrated the immense range of Brooks’s talent.

As shown during the second part of the documentary, Brooks’s filmmaking career had some big ups and downs after “Silent Movie” (1976) and “High Anxiety” (1977). Although his next three films, “History of the World, Part I” (1981), “To Be or Not to Be” (1983), and “Spaceballs” (1987), were not that successful, he established his own movie production company, which produced a number of acclaimed (more serious) films such as “The Elephant Man” (1980) and “The Fly” (1986). In case of “Elephant Man”, Brooks gave a chance to a young filmmaker named David Lynch without any hesitation after watching Lynch’s first feature film “Eraserhead” (1977), and the following critical success of “The Elephant Man” certainly boosted Lynch’s career a lot.

Around the point when he made his final feature film “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” (1995), Brooks’s career seemed to be near the end, but, what do you know, there came another turning point thanks to the enormous success of his Tony-winning Broadway musical “The Producers”. During the next 25 years, he kept going as usual while receiving a number of awards including an Honorary Oscar, and we will get the sequel to “Spaceballs” in the very next year.

Nevertheless, Brooks has become more aware of the approaching mortality as many of his friends and colleagues passed away one by one. He was certainly quite devastated when his wife passed away in 2005, and he was also deeply saddened by Reiner’s death in 2020. He and Reiner often spent a lot of time together in Reiner’s house as longtime friends/colleagues, and the documentary becomes poignant when Rob Reiner, who sadly died in last year, talks about how close Brooks and his father were to each other.

Overall, “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” is a funny and sincere tribute to its exceptional human main subject, and directors/co-producers Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio deftly assemble a various amount of archival footage clips and interviews to give an intimate portrayal of Brooks’s life and career. As far as I can see from the documentary, Brooks still has enough life and spirit for us as well as himself, and I sincerely hope he will amuse us more during next several years at least.