Found Sounds and Such...

I had no idea Joan Rivers was funny.

I don’t know her as a comedian. Or as an actress. Just as a personality. And it’s a personality that rubs me the wrong way whenever I catch it in short bursts during, for instance, her signature red carpet reports.

But when she savagely desconstructs that gig in the opening minutes of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the excellent documentary that opened the 5^th annual Berkshire International Film Festival last night—seen in a dingy club gig, Rivers holds a microphone forward and rants, “You think I want to be on the red carpet? ‘Who are you wearing? Who the fuck are you!?!?’”—I suddenly realized how much I was missing. 

As seen in this unflinching doc, Rivers is foul-mouthed, painfully self-aware, at times painfully un-aware, simultaneously desperate for fame and profoundly unsatisfied by it, and, more often than not, flat-out hilarious.

Co-directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg seemingly had full access to Rivers and her staff over the course of a year, and capture many unguarded moments—though, even at her most discouraged, disappointed, and desperate (perhaps especially then), Rivers seems fully aware of the entertainment value she’s providing.

Though the film aptly opens with extreme closeups of makeup being applied to that famously worked-on face, the opening montage concludes with a glamor shot of the finished product. This reflects the line the filmmakers walk throughout. They keep an even-handed perspective, freely depicting the loneliness of the subject while seemingly keeping on good terms throughout. And so, it sometimes seems to cut close to the bone but not quite close enough.

Rivers is seen openly grubbing for any gig she can find (“I’ll wear a fucking diaper, I don’t care” she says at one point), but rather than probe too deeply the essential sadness of these sequences, the filmmakers briskly punctuate them with flatteringly hilarious stand-up footage, or well-curated “legacy clips” (from The Tonight Show and elsewhere) that place Rivers as a comedy icon in the mold of outlaws like George Carlin.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes when Rivers scans the script of a potential TV vehicle.

“I can’t find me anywhere,” she says.

The painful conclusion implied (though never hammered home) is that there in fact is no there there. Rivers craves fame for the sake of fame, but feels perpetually discounted and defeated. Maybe some of it is shtick. But when she consents to a Comedy Central roast because of the “extraordinary money” it pays, even though she knows she’ll be humiliated by the process, it’s a bit difficult to empathize because her eyes are wide open throughout.

Because of her frankness, we enthusiastically root for her to win a big payday, at whatever means. We share in the victory when she graduates from a dingy New York club to a 4,000-seat theatre. In the most painful sequence for the audience, Rivers’ autobiographical stage show is panned by West End critics (after apparently receiving a strong reception at the Edinburgh Festival). The limited excerpts shown in the film do not disprove this take. But Rivers is clearly thrown by the reception, and she declines to take the show to New York so as to save herself the humiliation of yet more negative reviews.

“My acting career is the thing that’s most sacred to me,” she says. “My career is the career of an actress. I play a comedian.”

Hrmm. For someone intensely aware of her persona, who leaps at the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice despite her misgivings simply because it’s “face time” on network tv, she seems here to be at the greatest disconnect with her own abilities and legacy.

Is it endearing? Not necessarily. Yet the yuks are not squeamish, because she continually gives us permission to laugh. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad.

The Berkshire International Film Festival continues through Sunday evening. My plans for tonight? The Taqwacores, about the Muslim punk scene in Buffalo, NY (yeah, I know, the topic is played out and everything…) and Soul Kitchen, which looks to be a charming German film about a restaurateur. I’m skipping the tribute event for actress Patricia Clarkson (The Station Agent, The Untouchables) and a screening of her upcoming film Cairo Time.

See my advance piece on the festival in Metroland.

The LA Times on Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.