Desperate Character

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Directed by Ricki Stern & Annie Sundberg Runtime: 84 min.

Desperation was always part of comedian Joan Rivers’ shtick. Her first appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in the 1960s were dispatches from a reluctant housewife’s wilderness. None too satisfied with her pre-Betty Friedan lot, Rivers refreshingly scoffed at domestic conventions, from homemaking to sex. Too bad documentarians Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg don’t know how to read Rivers’ anxiety. Their film Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work follows the year in which Rivers turned 75 and, after numerous ups and downs, made a millennial media splash on Donald Trump’s TV series The Celebrity Apprentice.

Stern & Sundberg don’t catch the joke that Rivers is nobody’s apprentice—she even flouted Johnny Carson’s mentorship, incurring his ire and losing his powerful support (she claims Carson blackballed her from the NBC network). Rivers isn’t kidding when she says: “I have no choice. Ask a nun why she’s a nun. I have no choice.”

A Piece of Work zips past the most fascinating aspects of Rivers’ life, missing the way her proto-feminist humor oddly—desperately—warped into camp. Stern & Sundberg don’t seem interested in why; they simply measure Rivers by the gross standards of contemporary showbiz convention where nothing matters but face time. Rivers points to a blank page in her appointment book and gasps, “That’s fear. [No appointments] would mean that everything I worked for in my life didn’t work.” The filmmakers stay on the surface of “A year in the life of a semi-legend.” That subtitle doesn’t make up for ignoring how Rivers once invaded the upper classes through the famous Blackglama furrier ad campaign (“What becomes a legend most”).

Nothing—not even daughter Melissa’s assessment of all comedians as “damaged”—validates this worshipful portrait of craven showbiz. Stern & Sundberg admire the shamelessness that Rivers has aged into: She outlasted her Blackglama moment and then became monstrous. Only desperation explains the horrendous plastic surgery she boldly confessed to decades ago. It made her seem more showbiz than normal, whereas her comedy—edgy Jewish domesticity—once made her seem saner than most.

Rivers admits, “My career is an actress’ career. I only play a comedian.” That’s a key insight to how careers chose people, not vice-versa. Consider how the talented actress Oprah Winfrey’s ambitions foundered into a billionaire talk show host where her anxieties and egotism go undisguised. In comedy, Rivers’ eccentricities hang out in sometimes obnoxious, brilliant ways. (She handles a Wisconsin heckler with aplomb, then regret.) Her ambitions as an actress and playwright are shown but not explored. Her outlandish autographical TV movie Starting Again is glossed. There’s no mention of her 1970 film directing debut Rabbit Test that starred Billy Crystal as a pregnant man—or how that project illustrated Rivers’ ingenuity and the showbiz industry’s timidity.

There was a chance to make an honest industry portrait like Lisa Kudrow’s HBO series The Comeback, where her desperate Hollywood character Valerie Cherish embodied both arrogance and vulnerability. But from its Mommie Dearest opening close-up of a woman’s make-up prep, A Piece of Work immediately delimits its subject. Stern & Sundberg edge into making Rivers an object of fag hag pathos rather than explore her intelligence. It’s unfair to Rivers that this superficial portrait suffices to present her as a showbiz yenta; viewers are encouraged to revere Rivers as a fame monster.