You can keep your Mildred Pierce and Mermaids, your Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment—Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994) is the greatest mother-daughter movie of all-time. “But what about Mommie Dearest?” you might counter. “What about Volver, Imitation of Life, Freaky Friday or Postcards from the Edge?”
To which I can only reply that Tears and Laughter is a dramedy about producer Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide starring his actual widow, Joan Rivers, and their daughter Melissa, a non-actress whose performance is the made-for-TV equivalent of Sofia Coppola’s maligned turn in The Godfather Part III. If you love things that are terrible, it gets no better than this, a tearjerker that opens with liposuction jokes and excerpts from a typical Rivers routine: “I went to Las Vegas, I threw my hotel key up at Tom Jones. He took it and burglarized my room.”
Joan then recounts the painful events of 1987, the worst year of her life. There was her hysterectomy, husband Edgar’s triple bypass surgery, and their dismissal from Fox after the cancelation of her talk show. “Then Edgar had his nervous breakdown,” she continues. “Then he committed suicide.” As Rivers mentioned in a 2007 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, suicide was still regarded as an impolite topic of conversation in the ’80s and early ’90s. Mining it for yuks, as she did from the start, was controversial, inviting scorn from some critics while eliciting letters of appreciation from mourners who’d been in her shoes.
Caught in a financial bind, she plots a career reinvention even as she’s fired by an agent who deems her “unbookable” because “Nobody wants to see a woman whose husband just committed suicide trying to be funny.”* Undeterred, she gamely fills rooms at the small Midwestern comedy clubs she thought she’d left behind 20 years earlier. Melissa, 19, depressed and away at college, resents her mother’s swift return to work and her wisecracks about Edgar’s death. “She wants me to be the widow on the hill,” Joan tells her faithful manager, Dorothy (Dorothy Lyman of Mama’s Family, her shoulders unexposed), as tensions grow between them.
Mother and daughter, now living on opposite coasts, have a Yom Kippur reunion in New York that is fraught with all the dramatic—and comedic—possibilities of Christopher Guest’s Home for Purim, but screenwriter Susan Rice and director Oz Scott are unable to deliver the goods on that occasion. Much of the action is instead centered on Melissa’s burgeoning relationship with Porter (Mark Kiely), a wealthy jerk with penchants for violence and nose candy, and her concerns that Joan will sell the family home in Beverly Hills after winning a Neil Simon role on Broadway.
Melissa Rivers, I must sadly allow, can’t act her way out of a paper bag—she walks and talks less naturally than the animatronic characters at Chuck E. Cheese. But that didn’t dampen my ardor for Tears and Laughter in the least. She cannily captures her mom’s appeal (and that of the film) during one of their arguments when she huffs “Honestly, mother, […] do you need to turn everything into such a soap opera? I mean, you always cast yourself as the star of a Joan Crawford movie.”
Fans of the elder Rivers know how true that was. Her self-deprecating humor sometimes lent itself to paranoia and myth-making, as depicted in the 2010 documentary A Piece of Work, which found her implausibly pretending her career was on the ropes. In Tears and Laughter, she balances the genuine drama of Edgar’s death with the discordantly glitzy and graphic melodrama of Melissa’s abusive relationship. Whether she’s yelling at Melissa about Edgar’s private struggles (“Were you there for the black depressions? You came in the last seven minutes of this movie!”) or rushing to the hospital to comfort her, still dowdily costumed for the stage, Tears and Laughter gives the comedian the sort of meaty role she always craved—and she was ready for her closeup.
*The one-sided Johnny Carson feud, only briefly referenced in “Tears and Laughter,” didn’t help.
Streaming and DVD availability
Tears and Laughter hasn’t been released on DVD but you can currently stream it on YouTube. Please report dead links in the comments below and I’ll try to find replacements.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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