In Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's illuminating but not lacerating documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comic says, "No man has ever told me I look beautiful. They've said, 'You look great, you look terrific.' But never beautiful." Implicit in that bald statement is a sense of longing, the kind of thing you don't expect from a woman with the everyday vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave.
But the marvelous thing about Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is that it doesn't treat that statement as a contradiction: In the context of everything in the movie that comes before and after it -- and in the context of Rivers' cosmetically smoothed, tightened and polished face, which has been the object of plenty of derisive jokes, although Rivers herself has always been bracingly up-front about it -- that longing for beauty makes perfect sense. A Piece of Work follows Rivers through her 76th year (she is now 77), a year in which she published and/or promoted two books, wrote and performed a one-woman show, did stand-up routines in venues both cavernous and tiny, was a contestant on "Celebrity Apprentice" (she won) and appeared at the Kennedy Center tribute to George Carlin -- and that's just for starters. Still, Rivers can't keep her appointment book full enough. Early in the movie, we see her poring over the blankish pages of that book, kvetching about the emptiness therein and proudly showing off a page from an older book and a busier year, each calendar day a barely readable thicket of black ink. "Now that's a good page," she says, holding it up proudly for the camera.
A Piece of Work is about an individual and about a career (at one point Rivers refers to herself, aptly, as "a small industry"), but it's also about the nature of work, and about our fears that when the work stops coming in, we've outlived our usefulness. If Rivers -- whose career has been chugging along, through various ups and downs, for nearly 50 years -- can't outrun that fear, no one can. She's also extremely vocal about how aging harms women performers more than it does men. No one wants to look at an old woman, she says plainly (and more than once).
But that's pretty much the beginning and end of Rivers' self-pity, if you even want to call it that. She hasn't always had an easy time of it: Since her emergence in the mid-'60s as one of the few woman comedians working at the time, she's had and lost her own talk show, and she suffered the 1987 suicide of her husband and business partner Edgar Rosenberg. She was frozen out by one of her earliest supporters, Johnny Carson, who felt betrayed when she launched her show on the then-nascent Fox Network. (He never spoke to her again.) And now, as her longtime manager, Billy Sammeth -- who has himself, it turns out, caused Rivers some anguish -- puts it in the film, people have come to "see her as a plastic-surgery freak who's past her sell-by date."
No wonder Rivers wants to keep working, if only to defy anyone who thinks she's over as a performer or as a person. Stern and Sundberg's previous documentaries include the 2007 The Devil Came on Horseback (based on the memoir of former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle, who took action to expose and curtail genocide in Darfur), but A Piece of Work, as enjoyable as it is, isn't fluff. Stand-up comics are frequently insecure, anxious people, and Rivers fits the bill. Stern and Sundberg have fashioned the material they've collected, which includes performance footage as well of lots of casual, spontaneous and sometimes brilliant wisecracking on Rivers' part, into a portrait that's sympathetic without being fawning or pitying. And in the process, they capture the flipside of Rivers' insecurity: She knows how good she's had it, compared not just with other performers but with other people. In one of the movie's most extraordinary moments, Rivers delivers a Thanksgiving dinner, on behalf of one of the charities she champions, God's Love We Deliver, to an apartment-bound New Yorker. She chats with the woman -- her name is Flo Fox -- and learns that Fox herself was at one time a successful photographer. Later, Rivers does some online research and discovers how illness derailed this woman's livelihood; the compassion she shows is the kind of thing you can't fake for the camera.
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.