SEE THIS MOVIE!

This weekend I FINALLY had the opportunity to see the critically acclaimed documentary, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," which follows the once revolutionary and always iconic comedienne through a year of her roller coaster career, when it seems to have come to a tragically discouraging low point. I went into this expecting big things, and my expectations were met and even surpassed.

Most people of my generation regard Rivers as a mere caricature that is the constant source of parody and endless mockery. A plastic surgery cautionary tale and a red carpet gadfly. What the documentary illustrates is how she's aware of, okay with and participates in that the parody is for the benefit of her career, and the alternative to it, is not having a career at all. And one thing Rivers is not okay with, is abandoning the pursuit of artistic relevance. Her place on the comedic hierarchy is one that has shifted drastically and is fascinating to see chronicled in a documentary, as it is also fascinating to see the psychological results that that shifting can have on a real individual in relentless pursuit of their passion.

Piece of Work also shows how the purpose of comedians in society is to fill that role, making things that could be construed as tragic as humorous and more bearable. The difference between Rivers and many comedians though, is her level of credibility amongst the general public has suffered because of her ability to manipulate her image and turn it into shtick.

Part of this is obviously because she is a woman, and female comedians are certainly coming from a disadvantaged position as they're limited by the bounds of societal propriety about what they can joke about and how they're allowed to perform their funny. But Joan has defied those confines throughout her entire career making her presence as a pop cultural feminist justified, relevant and productive.

I don't just want to gush here about how much I love her and what she's done for women in comedy and how her resilience is so fairly portrayed in this film without indulgent glorification or the public's oversimplification of her, BUT, I will say that if you haven't heard of this movie watch the trailer here and go see it because you won't regret it!

A Story About Two Strangers, One a Little Stranger...

So after having seen the trailer for the new(ish) Fox Searchlight flick, Adam, I immediately thought "I have to see this movie," cute, atypical love story with a hot chick and a quirky guy, everything I ever wanted when I was straight. Though I'm starting to admit myself the realization that more often than not trailers turn out to be much more enthralling than the films they're advertising, and this was unfortunately not an exception.

Point of warning, there are plot spoilers in here, so if you intend to see this movie, I have two pieces of advice, one, don't read this, two, wait for the DVD.

The movie tracks the relationship of aspiring children's author and daughter of privilege Beth and Asperger's syndome sufferer Adam, who we learn from the film's opening scenes has just lost his father and works as an electrical engineer for a toy company, a job framed as unsuited for him because of his overzealousness about the technological capabilities of his creations and a lack of attention towards the necessity of efficient production.

Beth and Adam have a meet-cute in the laundry room of their building, where she has just moved into, and he loans her his laundry card as she unloads her clothes into the washing machine and her back story onto Adam. The film then tracks their interactions and illustrates Adam's bafflement about how to deal with his attraction to Beth, and Beth's underexplained attraction to Adam's eccentricities (which any viewer who saw the trailer knows all along is caused by his disability).

There's also a kind of cumbersome side plot of Beth involving her father, Peter Gallagher, who comes across as a Sandy Cohen but is really way more a Caleb Nichol, and legalities behind some business dealings...I don't know. I think that her dad was intended to act as a foil to Adam in that although Adam lacks tact and is a fountain of impulsive honesty, her dad's dishonesty was always cloaked in a manipulative masquerade of good intention. But this is really beside the point.

The point is that from the beginning Beth is a completely unsympathetic character who is too self-centered and unjustifiably perpetuating problems for herself with her own naivety. It is clear to the viewers from their initial interaction that there is something different about Adam that is rooted in more than nerves or a low level of social skills. His Asperger's, which is a form of autism characterized by difficulties in social interaction, is pretty ostensibly manifested in his interactions with her to the point that she comes across as oblivious and self-martyring for trying to maintain a romantic relationship with him.

I am definitely not saying that romantic relationships aren't possible for these people. However, the film doesn't realistically portray what motivates the development of Beth's attraction to Adam beyond the level of friendship. She just comes across as unjustifiably feeling sorry for herself for misalignments of their points of views and comes across as selfish and cruel at points in the way that she seems to set him and herself up for collective emotional instability.

The one good part is that they don't live happily ever after. But the film does take an equally formulaic approach of tying loose ends. Adam moves to California doing something with astronomy, which is a topic he is an idiot-savant for, after having been heavily prepped for the interview process by Beth. And Beth stays in New York, opting not to go with him and instead publish her children's book about a family of racoons living in Central Park that just didn't belong there (a reference to their first date of sorts).

Beth acts as, how Neil Morris puts it, "Adam's social guide dog" into the closing scene of the movie where it all becomes apparent that without all that heartache, Adam never would have ascertained his full potential. And neither would have she.

I will say that for an indie flick it did lack the typical overwhelming element of social commentary, aside from the obvious exposure of living with Asperger's (which I do think is important exposure) and one scene where an egregious arrest is attempted on Adam for looking for Beth at the school playground (damn the pigs), and it also lacked the excessive use of handheld camera (though it found its nauseating way into a couple scenes). Overall save yourself the eight bucks and ask an open-minded only child what they think it'd be like if they fell for an autistic guy in an apartment they probably don't deserve in Manhattan. You'll probably get a similar narrative as Beth's.