Movies You Might Have Missed: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Rachel Brosnahan recently received a Golden Globe award for her magnetic performance in the lead role of the Amazon Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The programme, about a Jewish mother in the 1950s embarking on a career in stand-up as her marriage falls apart, was inspired by the remarkable Joan Rivers.

Brosnahan has admitted to modelling her delivery in the stand-up scenes on the iconic trailblazer, and it’s clearly no coincidence that the show focuses on an educated, Jewish girl from a comfortable background who, like the inspiration for the character, turns to comedy as a means of escape.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) is about as far from hagiography as it is possible for a documentary to be. It follows the comedian for 14 months of her life in her mid-seventies in a relentless pursuit of work. One telling moment involves Rivers opening her diary and showing the cameras pages and pages devoid of gigs before saying, “I’ll show you fear. That’s fear.” This might be the most honest film ever made about the art of standing on a stage and attempting to make strangers laugh, and what compels people to keep going long after retirement age.

Unlike most documentaries about comics, the filmmakers never forget just how funny their subject is. Like Mel Brooks, Rivers seems unable to turn off and proves as anxious, hilarious and caustic offstage as she is on it. The comedian’s dual nature, the sensitive soul capable of the most devastating put-downs, is never better illustrated than during a show in which she tells jokes about Helen Keller but is heckled by an audience member whose son is deaf. One can hear Rivers’s voice break during the heated exchange and after the performance she seems unable to get the incident out of her mind.

Similarly, like Garry Shandling’s character Larry Sanders, she is beset by anxiety after agreeing to become the victim of a televised roast and seems to enjoy nothing about the experience of being publicly humiliated by her idols. It is an entirely understandable response but one that is usually concealed by those in show business.

Rivers, like Amy Winehouse, was one of those rare artists seemingly incapable of being anything but genuine, whatever the context. A Piece of Work tells the story of a heroine who changed perceptions about women in comedy while simultaneously pulling no punches about the desperation of a performer knowing the end is near in every sense. It is an essential portrait of a fascinating character, not least for those people suffering from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel withdrawal symptoms.