REVIEW: No Rest For the Wicked in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

But in between the serious stuff, there's a lot of crazy-wonderful quipping. Rivers takes us on a tour of her lavish gilt-and-brocade living quarters. "This is my apartment," she tells us with the sweep of an arm, turning our attention to this elaborate feat of interior decoration. "It's very grand. This is how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she had money." Elsewhere, she checks out the bathroom-area of a theater where she's about to give a performance. "Once a Jew, always a Jew," she says, brandishing a mini Lysol can.

Rivers is an old-timer, all right. At one point she shows off the extensive filing system she has for her jokes: Over the years, she's written each one on an index card; the cards have then gone into a massive set of wooden library-style drawers, each one marked with -- get this -- a Dymo label. (One drawer contains everything from "Cooking" to "Tony Danza.")

Rivers, all that cosmetic surgery to the contrary, isn't exactly fighting old age -- she knows that's a losing battle -- and now and again in A Piece of Work, she laments the fact that all her friends are dying off. On the other hand, Rivers appears to have more energy than most 30-year-olds; she gets more done in a day that some of us could accomplish in a week. In that sense, she doesn't seem particularly "old" at all, although some of the vintage footage here -- of Rivers in the '60s as she was building her career, joke by joke, on television appearances with Jack Paar and Johnny Carson -- reminds us how much can change over 40-odd years. In the earliest of those appearances, Rivers comes across as perhaps slightly shy, even, as hard as it is to believe, somewhat soft-spoken. In later appearances, as her confidence and her repertoire grow, she's bolder and more magnetic.

She was also, it's now clear, something close to beautiful. Rivers' face circa the late 1960s, with that take-no-prisoners jawline, those hyper-alert eyes, that broad, expressive mouth, was one of the great faces of the era. The problem is that we never know which faces define an era until that era has passed, taking the youthfulness of those faces with it. Today Rivers looks very little like her old self (admittedly, the fact that her face doesn't move anymore is a loss) and more like, perhaps, a Gabor sister. She's not a great beauty, at least not in the way she may have wanted to be, but she's at least an approximation of a great beauty. As she probably sees it, that's a whole lot better than being forgotten.

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