The other day I referred to Alex Gibney as "the hardest working man in documentary". Well, even Gibney may have to take a seat behind Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern. Since their debut feature, THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT, launched at Sundance in 2006, they've completed three more features, including this year's Sundance premiere, JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK.
And if the buzz today at Sundance is any indication, it is likely to be Sundberg and Stern's most high profile film to date.
As the LA Weekly's Karina Longworth notes, it's not exactly a topic that you'd think would be in the filmmaking duo's wheelhouse:
"Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg have made a name for themselves making documentaries (THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT, THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK, THE END OF AMERICA) that could be considered works of activism, in which charismatic victims of and witnesses to injustice offer evidence intended to raise not just the viewer's consciousness, but their ire. The pair thus did not seem like the obvious choice to tell the story of Joan Molinsky Rosenberg, the nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn better known as foul-mouthed comedienne/plastic surgery addict Joan Rivers.
Amazingly, JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK might be best understood as one of a piece with Stern and Sundberg's activist work. If the entertainment industry ain't exactly Darfur, it still hasn't been an easy road for Rivers, whose boundary-breaking comic creativity will likely be listed low in her obituary, to make room for discussion of her obsession with reinvention. Stern and Sundberg sympathize with the star's plight, and provide an excellent platform for her gut-busting politically incorrect comedy to speak for itself."
Mark Olsen, writing in the LA Times, concurs:
"The Rivers film is a clever mix of the comedian's scabrously relentless stand-up -- barely minutes into the film she has dropped a C-bomb in referring to her own daughter -- while also providing intimate, unguarded glimpses into what makes Rivers tick, what has kept her and her career going for decades.
The film opens with a series of startling close-ups of Rivers' face without makeup, slowly showing as she puts herself together. The message seems clear form the start: This film will examine both the mask and what's behind it."
At Sundance, Rivers talked to ABC News' Sheila Marikar:
"I had nothing to do with (the film)," she said. "It was my best friend's daughter (Stern) [who made the movie.] My career was in the toilet, as usual, so she begged her daughter to do something with me. They followed me around for a year and a half hoping I would die."
Nathan Rabin The A.V. Club gives the film a B+
"A PIECE OF WORK is often raucously funny but tragedy is never far from the surface. The suicide of Rivers’ husband and partner Edgar casts a long shadow over her life and career and the incongruously thin-skinned comic never seems to have gotten over longtime champion Johnny Carson shunning and blacklisting her after she hosted an ill-fated FOX talk show that competed with, and was demolished by, Carson’s The Tonight Show. Rivers’ workaholic compulsions are at once admirable and unnerving; like a shark, she seems to think she’ll die the second she stops moving."
David D'Arcy Screen
"The filmmakers were given extensive access to Rivers, yet their work does not feel like an official tribute, thanks to the subject’s irrepressible spontaneity about sex, money, men, and her own plastic surgery. Never politically correct, Rivers asks if she could call the chic Michelle Obama “Blackie O”.
With archival tape and Rivers’s own recollections, the filmmakers make the point, without too much sanctimony, that Rivers’s rise in comedy, a men’s unforgiving profession, was remarkable."
Comments