Ostensibly a year in the life of Ms Rivers - and her 75th year in particular - this documentary comes over like an 85 minute pitch to potential employers. Rivers spends most of the film complaining that she doesn't get the breaks she deserves or the bookings she needs to sustain her opulent lifestyle, and admits without a trace of embarrassment that she will appear anywhere and sell anything if someone's willing to pay her for it.
Rivers is - much like Don Rickles who also appears here - one of those American comedy phenomena you either love or hate. Perhaps hate is too strong a word so let me change it for a phrase - you either love or don't find funny. Portions of her stand-up routine at a New York nightclub are sprinkled throughout the film and they would seem to suggest that a large part of her live act consists of the f word; not as part of the joke to add emphasis to the gag but actually as the gag. itself. And I thought Eddie Murphy had done that particular routine to death in the 1980s.
Directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sunberg never really manage to drill through the inch thick layer of make-up to discover the private Joan Rivers beneath. She talks about her marriage, her husband's suicide, her relationship with her daughter, and her (grotesque) plastic surgery but that's all stuff she made public long ago.
Maybe the reality is that there's nothing private left to reveal, except perhaps what she really looks like and that may be just too much. After all, this film only has an R rating.
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