WHERE LIFE INTERSECTS ART
NUANCED, FOUR-PART COSBY DOCUMENTARY THOUGHTFULLY NAVIGATES TOUGH TERRAIN
FILM REVIEW We Need to Talk About Cosby
Cast: Bill Cosby’s fans and
detractors Director: Kamau Bell
Duration: 4 h Available: Jan. 30 on Showtime, after which all episodes will be available on Showtime streaming and on demand
platforms.
To his credit, filmmaker Kamau Bell waits until the last five minutes of his four-hour documentary before asking the question: “Can you separate the art from the artist?” It’s a query simultaneously unanswerable and all too easy. Pick one. Yes. No. It depends on the art. It depends on the artist.
The best answer, at least as far as Bill Cosby is concerned, is to learn from the lessons Cosby taught in public, while using those lessons to make what he did in private less possible. Do as he says, not as he does.
Bell’s four-part documentary, which premièred at the Sundance festival this week ahead of a broadcast on Showtime, is nuanced — so much so that when I received an email months ago about it, I mistakenly believed it was going to apologize for the man. It does not.
What it does is examine his undeniable comic legacy, and how that intersected with allegations of rape by more than 60 women. Their testimony led to several still-active lawsuits and, in 2018, to Cosby being found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and sentenced to three to 10 years. Last summer that conviction was struck down on constitutional grounds, an event which blindsided Bell’s team in mid-production.
Episode 1 reminds viewers that Cosby’s fame goes back a long way. As far back as 1963, he was appearing on The Jack Parr Program, a rare Black guest amid an almost all-white studio audience. He was a contemporary of Black comic Dick Gregory, but where Gregory’s standup was often political, Cosby was sometimes described as “raceless,” which at the time was meant to be a compliment.
The “first Negro TV drama star,” to quote another headline from the day, also found fame in the ’60s in I Spy, for which he won the best-leading-actor prime time Emmy for three years running. His numerous spoken-word comedy albums are classics. Later, The Cosby Show became a staple of ’80s pop culture. I recently watched an old episode of The Golden Girls in which a joke involved a funeral being moved from a Thursday night because that was when Cosby was on.
Intercut with all this, however, are the stories of Cosby’s accusers. What sounds repetitive becomes increasingly powerful, as we listen to tale after tale that begins with: “I trusted him because it was Bill Cosby,” moving to “the next thing I knew I woke up naked,” and almost all ending with the woman apologizing to him for feeling ill or passing out or whatever she originally thought had happened that night.
Men and women of various races speak out in the documentary, but it is Black men who often have the most problematic reckoning to do. It is entirely possible for one person to make you feel proud of yourself as an African-american while committing heinous acts on the side. As one woman notes ruefully, Cosby was an expert at whatever he turned his mind to.
More complicated is the issue of the extreme divide between his public and private lives. Did he craft himself in the image of “America’s Dad” to remove suspicion, or to enable his crimes? Or might the whole thing have been just an incredible irony?
Regardless, We Need to Talk About Cosby is a fascinating program, though at times difficult to watch. It features some oddball detours into bits of American history we may not know or may have conveniently forgotten: Barbara Walters’ brief stint as a Playboy Bunny, part of a report she filed on Hugh Hefner; Cosby discussing how to use “Spanish Fly” on a segment with Larry King; and the oddly titled album Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs.
There’s no aha or gotcha moment here, although it’s suggested that Cosby’s world started to fold in 2014, when comedian Hannibal Buress called him a rapist during a standup set. Accusations, newspaper articles, magazine covers and lawsuits soon followed.
But I was quite struck by the words of Joseph C. Phillips, who played Martin on The Cosby Show. He recalls meeting an old friend from those days and asking: “Did he ever try anything with you?” An hour later she finished telling him. “She spilled it all and she said do you believe me? And I said, I believe you. She wasn’t lying. So he at least did it to her, and if he did it to her then yes, I believe that there were other women ... I believe them.” ★★★★