Movie: Joan Rivers – A Piece of Work
You don’t have to love, or even like Joan Rivers, to appreciate this documentary. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work covers the work aspects of Joan Rivers’s 75th year.
That’s right. She’s 75 and the drive and ambition that you’ll see in this piece will put the most energetic of 20-something entrepreneurs to shame. In fact, her absolute need to work is the through-line of the film. I can’t help but think that the movie will speak especially well to today’s job-uncertain audiences.
Joan Rivers knows she has image issues. She knows she’s considered over-the-hill in the show biz world. But she also knows that she’s not done. And she knows who she is and what she’s not.
That kind of awareness, warts and all, is imminently watchable. Even when she hurts herself, she doesn’t shy away from what is.
A repetitive message can be tiring, but Joan Rivers herself is always being interesting and doing interesting things here. The filmmakers did a good job at not showing extended sections of her play, the stand-up sets, the TV specials, etc. We know her work, and these elements can feel overly self-serving. Instead, we mostly see the preparations before and the consequences after. I found this a compelling approach.
I’ve had my own fluxuating opinions of Joan Rivers over the years. But she’s always had that ability to elicit genuine, and sometimes surprised, laughs out of me. She’s aware that she doesn’t have many of the natural qualities that one would associate with entertainment successes. She knows that she’s had to work, perhaps harder than most, for what she gets. This documentary shows all that and that elicits genuine, and not really all that surprising, respect out of me.