Mr. Wilder and Me

Mr. Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Billy Wilder (real life director of Some like it Hot, Double Indemnity, and my favorite: The Apartment) appears as a fictionalized but possibly accurate version of himself in a novel that masterfully synthesizes fact with fiction. For purposes of this review, I’m just going to assume that the facts about Billy Wilder are accurate (Apparently he wanted to direct the adaptation that would ultimately wind up in the hands Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List, a fact I did not know.)
In the summer of 1977, a woman named Calista crosses paths with the aging director, who is at work on a Greek island doing his latest project, which is an adaptation of a story called Fedora. It is through the eyes of this naïve woman that we experience Famous Director Billy Wilder. She knows nothing about him, other than he is important and famous somehow, but she does not understand why.

What follows is a love story of a sort. But it is not romantic or sexual. It is a love of the cinema and an exploration of what changed between the old days and the onset of the summer blockbuster and movies made by “men with beards,” a la Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.
The book is at its best in the parts where Wilder is just allowed to talk, to pontificate…through Coe’s synthesizing of his research of Billy Wilder, he is able to approximate what a night out with him might have been like, or what having a drink or sharing some cheese with Billy Wilder might have been like.

Having only seen The Apartment, I can say that it is complicated…not quite a comedy, with an overtone of self harm, death and suicide. It is a love story and an indictment of corporate culture and the good old boy network…but it is also one of the sweetest movies you could ever see.

This book is delightful. It doesn’t really move forward from plot point to plot point. It stops and stays awhile and lets you enjoy the characters. And the result is a love story about a film director whose kind of films just don’t get made anymore.




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