In the very first frames of co-directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s slippery documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the viewer gets a glimpse of exactly how much of the 'real’ Joan Rivers the filmmakers are going to let us see.
Behind the credits, tight close-ups of the subject’s face: the crows-feet etched into her temples; the blotchy pink skin; the sunken, sallow eyes of the famously-sculptured facade – are painted over with broad brush strokes by her (contracted) make-up artist. Foundation, first, then PlayDo-thick, garishly-tinted applications that mask the mask. For a split second, we see the woman impacted by a lifetime in-and-out of the glare of fame’s spotlight.
It’s what was promised us when we bought our ticket, yet it lasts about 40 seconds.
What we get instead is a beautiful construct – a reinforcement of the person’s status as a celebrity, but never any profound insight into the person as a person. For her entire life (as far back as her pre-teen years, apparently), Joan Rivers has sought to create for herself a public persona that is adored by the masses, the critics, her peers. This film certainly documents that struggle, but it barely touches on the brilliant comedic psyche that also fuels it.
Stern and Sundberg embrace the romance of the early years of television, and of Rivers’ associated career spike, with some splendid splicing of archival footage of her many appearances on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Younger viewers will mostly know Rivers from her excruciatingly bitchy role as the red carpet menace on cable network E! (whilst commentating a recent event, she said of director James Cameron, 'Well, he looks like a lesbian"); news of Rivers’ impact on the world of comedy will seem revelatory to most of under-30s. The film very purposefully and quite rightly positions her in the same professional league as Phyllis Diller and Lucille Ball – that breed of brash, brilliant female comedians that stepped out from behind the apron and white-picket fences of 1950s middle America and paved the way for the likes of Lily Tomlin, Roseanne Barr and Kathy Griffin (who appears in the film, verbally-drooling over her idol).
There are some lump-in-the-throat moments when Rivers recounts the life and self-inflicted passing of her husband, comedy writer Edgar Rosenberg (though a recent appearance on David Letterman’s late-night yakker, during which she spread her late partner’s ashes on his desk, is not addressed in the film). Her obsession with cosmetically-enhanced longevity is dismissed as being nothing more than what her industry demands (she won’t leave her bedroom in the morning until she is fully made-up; at times, she appears in the film only moments after a full botox treatment, looking as if she’s been spray=-painted after going three rounds with Mike Tyson). And a complex relationship with her manager of three decades, Billy Sammeth, is explored all-too-fleetingly – his propensity for faux idolisation of Rivers and frustrating disappearing acts just when she needs him the most suggests his mixed-up world may have offered better doco-fodder than the already over-profiled Rivers.
Though an undeniably slick and entertaining slice of celebrity life, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work must register as a middling effort from the producing/directing team that made the wrenching The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006), a shattering film that documented the wrongful conviction of a black man and the 20 year struggle to set things right. It’s one of the best documentaries of the last decade and, if the factual filmmaking skill that Stern and Sundberg displayed is certainly evident in their latest film, the insight into their subject matter is not.
Rivers’ daughter and professional colleague, Melissa, touches on what’s missing from this documentary when she says, 'I’ve known many comedians all my life and they are all really, really damaged people." As the documentary portrays her mother, Joan is driven, likable, fearless and certainly very funny. But damaged? Who knows...
