‘Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story’ Review: Judd Apatow’s Doc

It’s rare to see a lofty executive as front-and-center in a documentary as Netflix’s Ted Sarandos is in Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley‘s Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story. 

Sarandos takes justifiable pride in Bamford’s career, since Netflix helped launch her mainstream visibility with the documentary The Comedians of Comedy and then fronted two seasons of Bamford’s surreal and semi-autobiographical Lady Dynamite, which Sarandos boasts he bought from co-creator Mitch Hurwitz based on only a brief hallway pitch. Sarandos even calls Lady Dynamite his favorite Netflix original, a likably quirky choice, though he goes one step too far.

“Critics really did love the show, but then they didn’t talk about it much in the second season,” Sarandos declares, to which I can only say: I know at least one critic who had the second Lady Dynamite season in his Top 10 list for 2017.

That’s the thing about Maria Bamford. She has built a career on people taking personal ownership over “discovering” her. She’s been one of those “your favorite comic’s favorite comic” esoteric choices going back nearly 30 years. With every success, pundits have tipped her as being on the verge of breaking out, as if she craved something “bigger,” when the truth is that with her avant-garde eccentricities and increasingly confessional approach to her battles with mental illness, Bamford has never seemed destined for stadium tours. 

So anyway, Maria Bamford seems to be on the verge of breaking out with Paralyzed by Hope, a 115-minute exploration of Bamford’s personal and professional journey from Duluth to Altadena, with myriad roadblocks — depression, OCD, suicidal ideation, family tensions — along the way. 

The documentary has one serious problem that won’t bother many viewers and doesn’t fully detract from a portrait that blends the candid, silly, uncomfortable, sad and triumphant, just like Bamford herself.

The most Bamford-ian part of the documentary is actually the beginning, with Apatow and crew arriving at Bamford’s house, offering her a banana and a small cash payout — “Maybe we have no ethics here,” Apatow confesses — and sitting down for a casual conversation that Bamford compares to dating. This is before she agrees to do the documentary.

Bamford, of course, ultimately agrees to participate, and she participates with consummate candor, luring talking heads from her personal life — including her father and sister, who both admit to discomfort when they first saw Bamford’s on-stage impressions of them, and her husband, who is central to the documentary’s best and most heartwarming chapters. 

The documentary is well-represented with Bamford’s various colleagues, comics like Jackie Kashian, who met her at open mics in Minneapolis in the ’90s, and Patton Oswalt, Bamford’s Comedians of Comedy touring partner, who says without hesitation that when he first saw Bamford onstage he didn’t get her. 

Oswalt is far from the only person who required some exposure to understand Bamford, whose material has evolved to include Andy Kaufman-esque anti-comedy absurdity and those impressions, which have always been astonishing. Sarah Silverman, who seems to appear in every Apatow documentary, Stephen Colbert, who calls Bamford his favorite comedian, and Ron Funches, another of those comics who is always presented as being on the verge of breaking out, are among the many peers who show up to confirm Bamford’s greatness. 

The documentary’s biggest challenge or obstacle in telling Bamford’s story is something of a luxury problem: Maria Bamford has long been spectacular at telling Maria Bamford’s story, and she hasn’t been stingy in her openness. Bamford’s stand-up has been primarily autobiographical for years and she’s covered her stints in mental wellness facilities, her struggles to find a proper diagnosis and medication, her bumpy relationship with her family and several prominent tragedies in cable specials, talk show appearances, podcasts and, yes, in Lady Dynamite, which critics apparently didn’t support enough. 

If you’re going to tell Maria Bamford’s story, you probably won’t be able to tell it as well as Maria Bamford, so you’re going to lean into those various clips of her telling her story, at which point the question becomes: What, exactly, are you adding to this experience? The answer, in the case of Paralyzed by Hope, is that what’s being added is the platform, but not a lot else. Apatow frames several of those oft-discussed biographical details as surprises in a way that felt a little cheap to me — not grossly manipulative, but not exactly additive. 

Maybe the documentary’s biggest advantage and biggest revelations relate to recency. The chapter of Bamford’s life over the past year-and-a-half, which includes the impact of last January’s Eaton fire, hasn’t been processed onto the stage as fully. This is the chapter that even casual fans may not know, with details that admirably baffle even her various contemporaries. In a good way.  

In contrast to how Lady Dynamite depicted Bamford life, with its boundary-pushing whimsy and expressive weirdness, Paralyzed by Hope is shaped by a very straightforward, somewhat dry and largely familiar approach. Or it’s familiar if you know her story. Which some people don’t. Because Maria Bamford is on the verge of breaking out, but apparently not there yet. So it’s a good opportunity to fall in love with Maria Bamford if you’re unfamiliar. And even if you know the story, the way Bamford tells it remains refreshing and fully involving.