‘We Need to Talk About Cosby’ Review: A Knotty, Thoughtful, Complicated Look At An Icon & Monster [Sundance]

Even the title of W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is loaded – because when we talk about Bill Cosby, we’re not just talking about Bill Cosby. We’re talking about rape culture, we’re talking about race, we’re talking about representation, we’re talking about celebrity, we’re talking about power… we’re talking about subjects that are larger than one entertainer, even one of the most successful and wealthy entertainers of the 20th century. But we’re also talking about him specifically because his is a rare case of a figure it felt like everyone agreed on, a universally beloved cultural icon, who became a persona non grata to many, a victim to others, and a puzzle to the rest. 

“Who is Bill Cosby… now?” Bell asks his interview subjects, early in the first of the docuseries’ four episodes, and, boy, it is a big question. It’s met with deep sighs, searches for words, tentative pronouncements, until Eden Tirl, one of Cosby’s alleged victims, points it back:  “What do you think, Kamau? What do you think?” And that personal approach is key; Bell is, by his own admission, “a child of Bill Cosby” – a Black stand-up comic born in the 1970s, raised by “Fat Albert,” “PicturePages,” “The Electric Company,” and “The Cosby Show.” It’s an understatement to call such a legacy “complicated.”

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“We Need to Talk About Cosby” functions, at its base, as a bio-doc, albeit not the kind of worshipful one we’ve grown accustomed to. Cosby is given his due in the history of comedy and placed in the context of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s – a time and place he didn’t really participate in, at least not publically, beyond representation. But that wasn’t nothing; Bell helps convey what a revelation he was on “I Spy” (the first leading role on a network drama for a Black actor), particularly in the context of popular culture in the 1960s, even if he was framed by the press of the day as “raceless,” “non-threatening,” and so on.

But one of the series’ most rewarding running threads is its nuanced exploration of his racial politics and philosophies, an “incrementalism” that occasionally, fleetingly veered into borderline militancy (watch this, it’ll blow your mind), while landing on a distressing, and arguably destructive, conservatism. Bell is fascinated by Cosby’s contradictions – he refuses to flatten his subject into an outright villain, noting his acts of quiet activism, public philanthropy, and most of all, the importance and appeal of the ‘80s sitcom that bore his name, with a particular focus the political and social spot that it filled for the country.

This is not to imply that Bell has made an apologia, in any way, shape, or form. We have to understand his cultural significance, and the personal extent of his celebrity, to truly reckon with the monstrousness of his acts. “There are a million reasons we don’t want what we know to be true about Bill Cosby to be true,” explains Dr. Danielle Morgan, and Kierna Mayo puts it more bluntly: “Just behind the curtain, there was the most immoral shit imaginable going on.” Throughout the series, Bell uses the potent graphic of a running timeline, walking through his career and the accusations that have appeared during it, from 1965 forward; we note the frequency, and the consistency, of these stories. 

But the most noteworthy sequences are those in which the survivors tell their stories. Bell uses minimal, unobtrusive editing, and does not interrupt, giving them the time and space to pause and summon it up and talk it all out – not only what was done to them, and the cold flexes of power therein, but their own shame (and even apologies) afterward. And he doesn’t use score here, so their words fill the soundtrack in a kind of lonely, ghostly silence. It’s extremely powerful. 

But for all of the disparity between the man and the work, the series also takes pains to follow what Mayo calls “the bread crumbs throughout his career” that hint, often broadly, at this horrifying kink. We’ve heard about the “Spanish Fly” bit from a 1969 stand-up album (“the motherfucker tells on himself,” proclaims Dr. Todd Boyd), or his discussion of the topic with Larry King in 1991 (an appearance promoting, Bell notes incredulously, a book called “Childhood” – which mentions Spanish Fly 15 times). But Bell also reminds us of a creepy “Cosby Show” sequence where Dr. Huxtable boasts that his barbeque sauce makes people horny, and writer Renee Graham points out that on a show where Cosby had full creative control, he made his character in OGBYN with an office in the basement of his townhouse – he’s “bringing women to his home, where he’s going to examine them.”

The series also displays a keen understanding of the psychology of sexual assault – the specific way Cosby preyed upon these women, and how his approach, his image, and the circumstances left them less likely to report or to be believed. He had taken such pains to present himself publically as a family man, an educator, a philanthropist, and “voice of moral authority,” and all of the other qualities that made his acts so hard to believe. But we cannot cleanly separate Cosby’s good and bad acts because he so frequently used his power, trust, and reputation for access, influence, and worse. “This stuff was out there,” film and TV critic Maureen Ryan notes. “No one wanted to grapple with it.”

Bell, thankfully, wants to grapple with it. The four-hour running time sounds daunting or excessive, another example of a feature-length documentary stretched out to series length because that’s what’s selling these days. But “We Need to Talk About Cosby” justifies the length because of Bell’s intellectual curiosity and journalistic thoroughness – he’s gonna grapple with all of it because it’s complicated. And while he’s covering a lot of territory, it never feels scattershot or unfocused; it’s a free-flowing conversation and consideration between the filmmaker (present in loose, laid-back narration, and as off-camera interviewer) and an assortment of (mostly Black) cultural commentators, historians, and stand-up comics.

There are a few small problems – when they started handing interview subjects iPads in “The Last Dance,” we all knew that was going to become A Thing in Documentaries, but it’s impossible to shake from its source – and one big one: Cosby’s conviction was overturned during the documentary’s production, a moment at which Bell confesses, “I don’t really know what this film is anymore,” and the closing section has some sense of that. But, of course, it’s impossible to wrap a story this messy up in a tidy little package anyway. What happens when the artist you idolize isn’t the human being you thought they were? “What then?” Bell asks. “That’s the Bill Cosby question.” And it’s a question bigger than any possible answer. [A]

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