Movie Review: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

<i>Joan Rivers: Piece of Work</i>. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Hilarious, disturbing and brilliant. An unflinching look at a desperate Joan Rivers makes compelling viewing.

This revealing, sometimes eye-watering portrait of the legendary American comedienne (I fancy that would be Joan's preferred spelling) should send you to YouTube to check out her half-century of trailblazing performances.

The woman who was doing standup routines about abortion in the 1960s is now 77 and discussing what sexual position you should adopt so you can most comfortably check your emails without interrupting (or being interrupted by) the action.

Put it this way: this dame don't do demure. And any female comic who doesn't acknowledge her debt to Rivers just hasn't realised it.

But this is no fawning celebratory portrait. Stern and Sundberg, who habitually work together, are documentarians whose output bespeaks an impressive versatility. In The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006) they anatomised a wrongful conviction that sent a man to prison for 20 years; in The Devil Came on Horseback, they revisited the horrors of the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan; and in The End of America, they adapted the incendiary Naomi Wolf book that argued that the US was approaching the end of a remorseless slide into dictatorship.

What unites these films is not theme, but approach. The first two - I have not seen the third - are driven by a desire to penetrate beneath the surface, no matter how long it takes: Trials took 10 years, and the Rivers film almost two. And what makes the latter so impressive is a frankness that is uncomfortable, even disturbing. "My career was in the toilet, as usual," Rivers has said about the film, "and they followed me around for a year and a half, hoping I would die."

That probably overstates it but the film-makers do not flinch as their subject spends a lot of time in something like death throes. The film is generous in its footage of the artist's past and present but, more than anything, it's a portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Constantly hungry for work, she unashamedly shows us a blank calendar page and says "That's fear", or lets us overhear a conference call in which she says to an agent "I'll do anything. I will wear a diaper [to get work]".

It's edgy, raw and brilliant. The sadness, if not the horror, of mortality underpins every one-liner and it's impossible to tear our eyes away.

The film is showing signs of reviving interest in the artist who has made the news for other reasons in recent weeks. She's being sued by her former manager - their break-up is one of the more touching moments in the film as she tearfully laments that he was one of the only people left to whom she could say "do you remember ...?" - and she publicly dissed Lindsay Lohan ("I was reading about the Lindsay Lohan diet ... all liquid. 80 proof") and Britney Spears ("I can't wait for her career to be over so she can serve me coffee at a 7-11. She's such white trash.") In the end, there's no glamour here, no advertisement for the magic of a showbiz life.

"I advise people to get out of [show business] all the time," she says. "If you can do anything else, then go into that. This is madness, and unhappiness, and constant rejection."

Directors: Ricky Stern, Anne Sundberg
Running time: 84 mins
Rating: M (contains offensive language and sexual references)

-TimeOut