‘Marty, Life is Short’ Review: Behind the Laughs, Netflix Uncovers a Life of Quiet Heartbreak and Unlikely Resilience

Anyone who has ever watched Martin Short on a late-night talk show knows exactly what they’re getting: a man constitutionally incapable of being anything other than charming, funny, and completely on. The hosts know it, the audiences know it, and by now it’s practically a law of television physics — if Martin Short is the guest, a good time is guaranteed. His fame, though, is a peculiar thing, at least outside North America. He never quite cracked the movies: he had supporting roles here and there, but the films he actually headlined were, more often than not, box office disasters of the polite, forgettable variety.

He passed through Second City and Saturday Night Live — the twin academies that produced half of American comedy — without ever becoming one of its certified legends. For decades he occupied that strange middle ground of being universally recognized without being quite famous, the kind of comedian who’s always around, always seems to be trying a little too hard to get your attention, and who you’re genuinely delighted to see when he shows up. The recent Only Murders in the Building, rather curiously, is probably the biggest and more universal success of his long career.

He knows all of this, and he’ll tell you himself. His failures, his lifelong need to be the center of attention, his equally lifelong talent for making that need seem effortless and endearing — Short has never been coy about any of it. What he has also never been short on — and the pun is unavoidable — is friends. Marty, Life is Short, the documentary Lawrence Kasdan has made about him, is practically a who’s who of Hollywood royalty, all of them apparently genuine, decades-long intimates of Marty and his late wife Nancy Dolman, who died in 2010.

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kurt Russell, Catherine O’Hara — to whom the film is dedicated — all turn up, full of warmth and anecdotes, testament to a man who has always been, by every account, exactly as lovely in private as he appears in public. A significant portion of the documentary is devoted to celebrating his marriage to Nancy, a love story that unfolds across decades with the kind of quiet, sustained tenderness that tends to make everyone else feel slightly inadequate by comparison.

The film moves through a life of modest hits (Three Amigos!, Father of the Bride) and spectacular flops with the self-deprecating humor Short has always wielded as his primary instrument. It makes the case — cheerfully, without straining — for what most people already sense: that he is, simply, a genuinely good person. Warm, funny, generous, exactly the same offstage as on. His comedy has always lived in characters and sketches — Ed Grimley, the nervous, pompadoured man-child; Jiminy Glick, the catastrophically uninformed celebrity interviewer — rather than in the confessional, observational mode that dominates stand-up today. There’s something old-school about him, something almost vaudevillian: a physical, instinctive, crowd-pleasing kind of funny that doesn’t require you to know anything about his personal life to work. He’s the rare comedian who is beloved by everyone and about whom almost nothing is actually known.

The documentary doesn’t attempt to change that. There are no dark revelations, no skeletons rattling out of closets. What it does acknowledge, with some care, are the losses: a brother gone too soon, both parents dead before Short was fully grown, and Nancy, who died at fifty-eight. There is also a loss the film couldn’t cover — his adopted daughter took her own life last February, after production had wrapped — which casts a retrospective shadow over everything. But the film’s interest isn’t in excavating pain. It’s in understanding how Short has chosen to meet it: with humor, with warmth, with the stubborn insistence on moving forward that has defined him since the beginning. Whether that constitutes admirable resilience or a very Canadian form of emotional stoicism is perhaps a question the film doesn’t feel compelled to ask.

Beyond that, Kasdan delivers a straightforward, affectionate career retrospective — theater, television, the many films that have been quietly forgotten by everyone including, one suspects, Short himself. The famous friends are interviewed on camera and also appear in home videos shot at his beautiful lakeside property in Canada, his birth country, with Spielberg himself apparently manning the camera for several of them. It is, in the end, a portrait of a man who has earned his legend the slow way: by showing up, making people laugh, loving his people fiercely, and suffering more than he has ever let on. Marty, Life is Short makes the case that he deserves every bit of it.