Review of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) by Morgan G — 21 Oct 2010

The filmmakers do a great job here--they show up for all the right moments, they get fairly candid (or at least interesting) behavior in front of the camera, they stay out of the way, and they cut together a good film. They're not trying to build a case or tell a story that hasn't been told before, they're just doing a straight career retrospective and they do solid work to that end.

They deserve credit for their talent and hard work, but, really, the highest compliment you can pay them is that they don't get in the way of the story. So what does this mean? It essentially means that the pleasure you get out of watching this movie will be directly proportional to how funny and interesting you find Joan Rivers to be.

Joan Rivers always seemed to me to be like a stable pony for the networks. She had good timing, nicely over the top delivery, and they could count on her to come out and hit her marks and launch some jokes at people. I never thought of her as much more than a perpetually-aspiring talk show hostess and tv business hanger-on. Even when they put "The Joan Rivers Show" on the air, she still seemed to be an aspiring talk show hostess. That's either audience bias or evidence of just how much filler is on tv all the time. Well, maybe both.

But she's actually really sharp and really funny. They catch her doing a lot of standup work and she is really fearless, saying just the most ruthless things and never backpedaling from them. That's a great comic, if they can keep finding the punchlines, which she seems for the most part to do. You can't put her in quite the same class with Richard Pryor who could find the humanity _and_ the humor in all kinds of uncomfortable situations and spin them whichever way he wanted to great effect. But she can find the humanity and the humor in being irritated, aggravated, and fed up with modern life, and that's probably an endless gravy train of material.

She really shows her ability to keep her wits about her in dealing with a heckler at a casino show in Wisconsin. He's a well-intentioned soul who's happy to pity one of Rivers' targets, and tells her so. He clearly feels that this shows what a caring, big-hearted fellow this evidences him to be. Her backlash is instantaneous and fierce. She stops the show to let him know what she thinks of his reflexive willingness to offer pity, and then slams the show right back into gear, the entire time pacing like a hungry tiger in a cage. This one moment shows Rivers at her most dimensional, seemingly heartless and flip but not without her reasons for taking the stance she does.

Ultimately, seeing how blue she's willing to work and how rough some of her attitudes can be makes her a lot more interesting. She can come off on censored tv as just a grouchy housewife, or, more recently, as an out of touch entertainment industry prisoner. Some of her attitudes may well be out of touch with reality, but she seems to know it and she's certainly not without compassion. And she certainly cares deeply about the people close to her, even if she publicly rakes them over the coals in her act. We learn a lot about her in this movie, and it's always entertaining and interesting.