Believe

'Believe' chronicles comedian Eddie Izzard’s rise to fame from his early influences - losing his mother to cancer at a young age before being sent with his brother to boarding school to his close present day relationship with his supportive father.

At school, when he saw what getting into the Cambridge Footlights Revue could do for your career his goal became to follow Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson and try for a place at the University. When that didn't work out he headed to the Edinburgh Festival, equipped with nothing but a unicycle and some banter, eventually figuring out how to draw a crowd. He's been working hard at it ever since.

'Believe' is the mantra of Eddie Izzard: if you want to be a singer, you've got to believe you can sing, if you want to be a comedian you've got to believe you can be funny. Eddie believes in Eddie and it was this rock solid self-belief that allowed him to perform onstage as a transvestite when it was considered career suicide. When his highly successful West End show, Dressed To Kill won critical acclaim he had only himself to thank for booking the theatre.

Director Sarah Townsend skillfully combines home video, stills and archival footage in this intimate and edgy portrait of the performer. (Courtesy of the Raindance Film Festival)

“Sometimes appearances aren’t deceiving: As a cross-dressing comic and sometimes dramatic actor, Eddie Izzard is just as complex offstage as on. The compelling documentary Believe condenses the comedian’s fascinating life into 105 minutes of interviews, archive material and — most importantly to understanding any performer — several decades of performance footage. Believe, which was directed by Izzard’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Townsend, suffers from the problem inherent in most Hollywood biopics: Smashing a man’s life into a series of “very important moments” creates a schizophrenic tone. Townsend also abbreviates several of Izzard’s early street and standup performances, taking away key elements from her story’s arc — the development of Izzard’s onstage persona. Regardless, Believe contains a good deal of footage thrilling to anyone excited by the backstage and onstage workings of live performance. Izzard also gives several genuinely poignant interviews, saving the best — a reflection on how the loss of his mother influenced his desire to be a comic — for a strong emotional kick to punctuate the proceedings. The best moment, however, is the legendary performance in which Izzard appears for the first time in his trademark dress and pantyhose. This magnificent scene and others like it prove that, as with comedy itself, sometimes great material is enough to overcome merely average presentation.” (John Wheeler, L.A. Weekly)