Movie review by Greg Carlson
Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan gives longtime pal Martin Short the celebrity documentary treatment in new Netflix movie “Marty, Life Is Short.” With a half century of show business experience under his belt, Short continues to perform at the age of 76 on stage and in the successful Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building.” Along with a number of his instantly recognizable SCTV peers, Short has collected enough noteworthy material to fill several feature-length retrospectives. And like last year’s Colin Hanks documentary on Short’s late colleague John Candy, “Marty, Life Is Short” knows that laughter and tears are often in close proximity.
The death of Nancy Dolman, who first met Short during the 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell” and married him eight years later, is handled toward the film’s end with the same kind of grace Short displays while addressing the unexpected loss of his oldest brother David (killed in a car accident in 1962 when Martin was just twelve) and the subsequent deaths of his mother and father. Kasdan and Short establish a sober reverence for life’s inevitable sorrows, a key element made all the more poignant by our knowledge that close friend Catherine O’Hara died in January and Short’s daughter Katherine died in February.
It is the presence of death and acknowledgement of mortality that balances the comic impulses in Short’s onscreen and offscreen personality (though we, like Short, are always aware of the camera’s recording eye). The man’s energetic gift for physical movement is matched by quick wit and lightning-fast responses honed by years of improvisation. At one point, Eugene Levy bestows high praise: “In this business, in the world of comedy, there’s nobody faster, there’s nobody smarter, there’s nobody funnier.” Along with that accolade, as well as John Mulaney’s note that Short is “good at life,” Kasdan and Tom Hanks reiterate the importance of joy as a guiding directive in how our subject approaches each and every day.
Most Short fans won’t mind the absence of more clips connecting the dots between the performer’s highs and lows. One of the movie’s most satisfying motifs is the notion that professional failure is, even for the most gifted, as frequent and inevitable as the massive hit. Short’s satirical Jiminy Glick, whose affinity for insulting the famous faces who walk into his talk show send-up buzzsaw, serves as an ideal reminder of Short’s lament that in our mediated existence there are too many instances in which one is stuck sitting across from (as Short puts it) “a moron with power.”
Comedy fans will frequently want to pause and rewind the utterly ridiculous collection of home video clips shot at convivial gatherings of family and friends during the holidays or at the kid-filled parties held seemingly nonstop at the idyllic Lake Rosseau cabin retreat in Ontario. Through it all, Kasdan makes a clear case that Martin Short has been one of the industry’s most well-connected talents for decades by gathering on-camera interviews with O’Hara, Levy, Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Andrea Martin, Steve Martin, and many other close friends with whom Short has maintained loyal relationships stretching back a lifetime.