STEVE! (MARTIN) (B-minus) - One of the great wits of our time, Steve Martin, gets the documentary biographical treatment in this tepid, extended film from the talented Morgan Neville. The film is divided into two parts ("Then" and "Now"), and both halves tick past the 90-minute mark, creating an end product that feels both bloated and rushed as it shifts tones while ranging across Martin's 60-year career.
The first part focuses on Martin's early struggles as an anti-comedian through his breakthrough as a rock-star goofball selling out stadiums. It plants the seeds of a cold-hearted upbringing and an insistent loneliness as success and fame showered on him. The second half brings us to the present and examines the psyche of a man who walked away from runaway success in favor of a respectable movie career, eventually growing comfortable enough in his skin to open his heart to a partner and a family late in life.
There is a tension between the two halves that never really gets resolved. Too much time is spent on Martin's early life and career (even while giving short shrift to his work with the Smothers Brothers and other TV shows of the late '60s and early '70s), padded out merely because there is quite a trove of home movies from Martin's personal archive. One remarkable result of this granular indulgence is the realization that Martin's comedy often was quite bad before he discovered the tipping point between stupid and artfully buffoonish. (Sometimes all that takes is a simple prop, like a gag arrow through the head.) Martin had the luxury of time and resources to hammer away for years until he hit on better ideas (like leading the audience outside of the venue after his shows, which created an almost literal cult following).
Neville has made some of our favorite documentaries in recent years, including "20 Feet From Stardom" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor." But he might be going a little too fast these days. His last film, "The Saint of Second Chances," was a mess. In this case, he might have taken a step back and decided how to do justice to Martin's life and career in a simple two-hour format, without the indulgence of time offered by Apple.
The second part has its moments -- occasionally we get true psychological insights into a thoughtful artist -- but they are weighed down in the muck of his boring family life. He found lasting love in middle age and became a father at 67, but who really cares? We get no insight from the likes of Tina Fey, Eric Idle and Lorne Michaels, and a knock-off "Comedians in Cars" appearance from the ubiquitous Jerry Seinfeld, who big-foots the proceedings and distracts with his tired shtick. We spend a lot of time with Martin's latest collaborator, Martin Short, but again, the truly funny moments (including their workshopping material for their stage act) are few and far between. Instead we are subjected to abiding Martin's manufactured self-deprecation, often as he and short swap dad jokes while running errands or, for no apparent reason, going for a bike ride.
Besides some keen observations from a couple of longtime female friends, only Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, a close friend, provides meaningful analysis, including a gloss on the contents of Martin's expansive art collection as a proxy for inkblots that help define a lifelong loner who finally learned to collaborate and open his heart. Deep into the second part Martin fully opens up about his tough nut of a dad (who responded to a screening of "The Jerk" by noting that his son was "no Charlie Chaplin"), and the emotion is real and affecting.
But rather than synthesize the various aspects of Martin's career and life into an expertly edited two-hour film, Neville dodges that more difficult task and instead dumps more than three hours onto the screen, leaving it for us to sort out. Fans of Martin will appreciate the overview of an impressive career (even if the comedy bits and the movie clips are way too clipped to be satisfying), and they'll probably gain some insight into one of the all-time great entertainers, a sly and exacting comedian who deserved a little better than this straight-to-streaming knockoff.
BONUS TRACK
Martin's meta-comedy started to take shape on "The Smothers Brothers Show," here circa 1968:
And one of my favorite jokes from the height of Martin's celebrity:
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