Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
The life and career of one of comedy's most inimitable modern voices, Mr. Gilbert Gottfried.
Gilbert Gottfried is an inherently fascinating subject — a deeply private man behind an outrageously abrasive public persona — and the documentary benefits enormously from that contradiction. The film offers genuine intimacy with Gottfried's family life and the tragedy of his career-ending tweet after the Japan tsunami, revealing layers most audiences never suspected. However, the cinematography is fairly standard talking-heads-and-archival-footage fare with little visual ambition. The structure is conventional for a comedic biography documentary, and while it succeeds in humanizing its subject, it doesn't push the form in any significant way.