Because filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg approach their subject as a survivor rather than a well-rounded human being. At 77, Rivers is a groundbreaker in the history of stand-up comedy, and it gives her no peace. She’s a joke in a culture that says women have to be either young or classy, and she doesn’t give a damn. All that matters is the next booking and the next audience.
When the movie opens, in 2008, the audiences are few and far between, and Rivers is starting to panic. She has another book coming out, she’s pitching a TV pilot, she’s selling jewelry on QVC, and she’s mounting a one-woman show for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. None of it is enough. She knows most people laugh at her instead of with her; she understands that endless cosmetic surgeries have turned her into a sock-puppet parody of her former self. And she knows — or insists on believing — that one comeback could turn it all around, whether that’s getting a spot on “Celebrity Apprentice’’ or bringing her autobiographical play to New York.
The filmmakers view Rivers with sympathetic curiosity as a sort of scarred show business shark, helpless to do anything except move forward. We see her onstage, battering disbelieving audiences into laughter with hilariously incorrect one-liners; after a heckler at one show protests a Helen Keller joke, the comedian tears into him, informing him her mother was deaf and howling, “Let me tell you what comedy is about — comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything and deal with it!’’
We see the peaks Rivers has ascended, and the hands she has bitten. She wrote a Broadway play called “Fun City’’ in 1972, which the critics savaged so mercilessly that she winces just speaking of it. Rivers could have been the next Johnny Carson — as it was, her many “Tonight Show’’ stints resulted in her being tapped as official guest host for years — but after going over to Fox for a doomed 1986 talk show of her own, Carson never spoke to her again.
