Gilbert appears to be just a profile of its main figure, the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried (if you hear his voice once you'll never forget it). It turns out Neil Berkeley, who followed Gottfried around for almost a year, was out to capture everything in his life and got both the mundane (but in amusing ways, like we literally see him clean his socks and underwear... in the sink in his hotel room) and the insightful. We see his family and their accomplishments (his late sister, Arlene, was a photographer), and specifically his wife and two kids, which he got late in life (he's in his 60's but doesn't look a day over 59). There's so much humanity bursting all around that it's sometimes easy to forget how much of a crumudgen Gilbert is... or that that is a cover for being a shy, basically good hearted person who has had a few blows in the public eye (sometimes of his own doing, but nothing ever maliciously meant).
This really was quite heartwarming, and what's lovely about it is that the director makes it about something deeper than just Gilbert (though he is as Stephen King once noted, a national treasure): we're seeing the vulnerability that comes with a person who uses comedy, and his show-business persona in general, as a defense mechanism because the world is such a cruel and terrible place. While he may claim to see his current family as something out of a "Twilight Zone" episode, or compare first seeing his first child like Karloff's Frankenstein coming up to the little girl by the pond in the film - his pop culture references know no limit, just listen to his podcast for that - Gottfried brings genuine joy for people, and that's all he can do.
This really was quite heartwarming, and what's lovely about it is that the director makes it about something deeper than just Gilbert (though he is as Stephen King once noted, a national treasure): we're seeing the vulnerability that comes with a person who uses comedy, and his show-business persona in general, as a defense mechanism because the world is such a cruel and terrible place. While he may claim to see his current family as something out of a "Twilight Zone" episode, or compare first seeing his first child like Karloff's Frankenstein coming up to the little girl by the pond in the film - his pop culture references know no limit, just listen to his podcast for that - Gottfried brings genuine joy for people, and that's all he can do.