Martin Short in Netflix's 'Marty, Life is Short.'

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Martin Short Says Daughter's Death Has "Been a Nightmare for the Family"

Just seconds later, Kasdan closes with title cards in loving memory of Short’s longtime collaborator Catherine O’Hara, who appears throughout the documentary, and his daughter Katherine, who does not.

It’s a whiplash emotional response, from giddiness to gravity, that typifies the journey Kasdan traces in Life Is Short and one that has typified Short’s life, marked by triumph and spikes of personal tragedy.

I’m sure there’s a dry, professionally distanced documentary to be made about Short’s career, his varied professional arc and his myriad achievements, but Life Is Short mostly isn’t that documentary.

As Kasdan and Short discuss, they have a lengthy personal relationship, and the director approaches this project much more as a curious and affectionate friend than a rigorous scholar of Shortology. This, in turn, leads to a documentary that’s much less Martin Short: Versatile Comic Genius and much more Martin Short: Lovably Damaged Celebrity Party Host. The initial sense that this might be selling Short’s gifts, well, “short” passes in a hurry. “Martin Short” seems to be a state of mind, one that isn’t as remote and inaccessible as you might think from the outside, and one we would all benefit from tapping into.

Marty, Life Is Short is, as much as anything, a documentary about not being defined by failure or tragedy.

“I would say my career has been 80 percent failure and I think those are pretty good odds,” Short says early in the documentary. Later, he ups that number to 90 percent. Recounting wisdom that Short gave him, John Mulaney quotes a “98 percent” failure figure. That’s not the way I think of Martin Short’s career, but if you actually go through his credits…he isn’t wrong.

Kasdan and Short’s relationship dates back to Cross My Heart, a Kasdan-produced romantic comedy that I think of as successful because it was all over HBO in the late 1980s, along with Three Amigos and Innerspace. I think of all of those movies as hits, but they were not, nor were Pure Luck, Three Fugitives, Captain Ron or Clifford. (There are clips from Mumford, which Kasdan directed and Short co-starred in, but they don’t discuss that collaboration. I do not think of Mumford as a hit.)

But if you live with enough joy and pick your projects based upon characters you want to play and people you want to work with, maybe the failures don’t linger in the same way as they might for somebody whose work-life balance teeter-totters toward the “work” side. And milking the joy out of every moment of the “life” side makes it easier not to dwell on the bad things that happen. And surely Short’s ledger has enough sad data points — a brother and both parents died within an eight-year period in his youth, his wife of 30 years died in 2010, his daughter died earlier this year — to predominate, except that they appear not to. (Neither O’Hara’s death nor the death of his daughter are discussed in the documentary.)

As a documentary subject, Short occasionally spends more time goofing off about the process than being serious, forcing Kasdan to use more reflective, probably more staged, conversations that Short has had over a career as a ubiquitous talk show guest. What Kasdan gets more frequently is Short happily re-enacting a breakfast that he explains he’s already eaten or e

'Marty, Life Is Short' Review: Lawrence Kasdan's Martin Short Doc