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Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern | Anne
Sundberg, 2010)
Shot over fourteen months, the
documentary seems to offer viewers an all-access look into Rivers’ personal and
private lives. Stern and Sundberg, who are best known for their excellent Darfur
documentary The Devil Came on Horseback,
treat Rivers with obvious respect, but still burrow directly into her obsessions
with work, aging, and the past. The opening moments of the film, in which we are
shown makeup being lacquered onto Rivers’ surgically altered face, set the tone
effectively, as they acknowledge tension between Joan the woman and Joan the
performer that will power the rest of the movie. A word of self-pity would never
slip from Joan Rivers’ profane mouth, and the film follows suit, depicting her
tendency for career immolation (most specifically in her dealings with NBC) and
her repeated returns from the ashes with the same soberness. Even the feel-good
element that emerges as the film wraps to a close, is wizened by the knowledge
that Rivers career will almost inevitably slump again. What ultimately results,
then, is a film that is limited largely by its own choice of subject matter.
A Piece of Work does a solid job of
deepening our understanding of Rivers, but its accomplishments pretty much end
there. 61 Jeremy Heilman 06.19.10
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Joan Rivers has been a fixture of the entertainment industry for something like
forty years, so the prospect of a documentary with her as its subject is less
than immediately compelling. Rivers, thanks to her constant presence in tabloid
media and her confessional, confrontational style of stand-up comedy, has had
her life laid bare for us repeatedly already, so one approaches
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
wondering if it could possibly offer an audience fresh insight about a figure
whom we all already seem to know. The answer is a pleasant surprise. Ricki Stern
and Anne Sundberg’s film offers not the trite portrait of an underdog that so
many previous entertainment documentaries would have led us to expect, but
instead delivers a more nuanced observation that careers in show business have
near-uncontrollable peaks and valleys that take a psychic toll on even the most
hardened of performers. Presenting Rivers as an almost possessed workaholic,
A Piece of Work doesn’t beg for
sympathy (even as it shows a more vulnerable Joan than we might be used to
seeing), but instead suggests that her persistence as a celebrity mostly can be
attributed to her own unrelenting tenacity.