Lawrence Kasdan’s “Marty, Life is Short” is a love letter from one lifelong friend to another. The immeasurably talented Martin Short sits down early in the bio-doc with Kasdan and jokes about how silly it is that they have to pretend they don’t know each other. They’ve had thousands of conversations, after all. Kasdan dismisses the idea. This won’t be one of those pretend bio-docs, even if it then does take a relatively conventional path through Short’s life from that point on.
While it’s a bit disheartening to see such a unique performer given such a traditional bio-doc, what comes through in “Life is Short” is the affection for its subject from pretty much everyone he’s ever worked with. He turned collaborators into friends for life, including Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Martin, and John Mulaney, all of whom appear here to sing the praises and admire the talents of someone they so clearly adore.
To be truthful, there are only a few insights in Kasdan’s film that would fall into the category of “what makes Martin Short tick.” Some of the material from his early years on “SCTV” and “Saturday Night Live” is the most illuminating, capturing a comedy scene in which the talent pool was so deep that it simply inspired everyone to swim harder. Short speaks about how everyone fell in love with Gilda Radner, and Levy and O’Hara reminisce about those days with smiles on their faces. Seeing O’Hara with Short gives the project an unexpected poignance, given her tragic passing. Even just this brief glimpse of her reminds one of her joy.
Joy is all over “Marty, Life is Short.” As a director, Kasdan fell in love with home movies of Short parties at a beach house that basically looks like everyone who ever made you laugh has hung out at a few times. The Short parties, hosted with his wife, Nancy Dolman (whose tragic passing is given a heartfelt chapter), were what could be called everyman celebrity parties.
People hear about celebs hanging out, and they have visions of catered affairs with high fashion. But these images are just of people laughing, smiling, dancing, and enjoying each other’s company, often with their entire families. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson speak of the memories they have of Short parties, and a clip of a “Forrest Gump” era Hanks doing a “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” scene with Short in full “Gump Mode” is hysterical. The Christmas parties would get so entertaining that people would rehearse song-and-dance numbers to perform at them.
The perfunctory career retrospective of Short’s life feels a little less half-hearted. The truth is that Kasdan’s familiarity with and love for Short understandably lead to a bit of skimming the surface when it comes to history and comedic process. He loves Short so much that he doesn’t feel much of a need to argue why we should, too. Mulaney does the best job of offering some insight into Short’s thick skin and self-criticism, pointing out how it took him decades to consider that “Inner Space” was now a beloved ‘80s movie because “it lost to The Golden Child,” which opened #1 that same weekend. It’s not that Short carried the pain of that, but he checked it off as a bomb and moved on, and it took a lot to convince him otherwise.
And he had many bombs. One is reminded, watching “Life is Short,” that much of the reclamation of Short’s comedic gifts has come relatively recently, spurred on by the wild success of “Only Murders in the Building” and his variety show tour with Martin. Short was always one of my favorite comedy performers as a child of the ‘80s, but the ‘90s and ‘00s weren’t as kind to him, except for “Father of the Bride.” Even “Clifford” took a generation to find its audience.
Ultimately, watching “Marty, Life is Short” as a huge fan of its subject makes for an entertaining if not illuminating experience. It might be more effective for those who aren’t big fans of the man who invented Jiminy Glick because they’ll get a compact (only 100 minutes) burst of the comic energy that is Martin Short. The rest of you might wish it were longer.
Now on Netflix.
