Normally, I have to weigh these celebrity centric documentaries, these career retrospectives, as how truthful, honest, open, or journalistic in nature they are.But also, sometimes, it is just OK to like something. Sometimes, the project itself almost erases the extra checkboxes it doesn’t check, because it accomplishes something else.

What Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill) has achieved here is the understanding that his good friend, Martin Short, is possibly the most well respected and liked person in Hollywood.This film is absolutely a simple, lovely, career retrospective for MArtin Short, and very much content creation for Netflix, who will likely launch another documentary film or series about someone else famous next week. I just saw a Kylie Minogue docuseries pop up as a suggestion. But, Kasdan, who highlights in the film that he has been a longtime friend of Short, called in the big guns. As expected, Steve Martin appears quite a bit, but so do Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, with Hanks and Short having recreated the final scene from Butch Cassidy in the most absurd way possible. Steven Spielberg is here with Kate Capshaw, another surprising close family friend, who knew not just Martin, but also his late wife Nancy (who is very much a focus of the film). There’s Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, longtime friends since SCTv days. John Mulaney drops in, having worked with Short on his one-and-done sitcom. And, yes, Catherine O’Hara is all over this documentary.While the film was clearly shot before the death of O’Hara, and Short’s daughter Katherine, both of them are reflected in an In Memory Of message at the end. Catherine O’Hara, in one of her final screen moments, showed up to talk about how great her friend Marty is, and how amazing Nancy was.

The film goes from Martin’s early childhood, where he had a difficult father, and a mother that died when he was a teen, all the way to him meeting Nancy, and following her on her journey to pursue her dreams as a singer. It was through this that he started working as a comedian and actor, and it took a little while for him to get recognized, joining the famed Second City troupe, and later Saturday Night Live. He has career highs, lows, starts a family, watches his wife courageously battle illness, and still claw his way back out of his depression following her death into a moment in his career where he’s never been so well liked. As his contemporaries point out, while some of his films may not have been immediate box office successes, they became classics, and movies like Three Amigos inspired John Mulaney’s generation.

It’s a comprehensive documentary, it is so warm, funny, and embraces this idea that everything is Ok if Marty is around. Seeing him playing with his kids, and the famous kids of his friends. He’s the guy who is always on. What we see on screen is seemingly what everyone gets. Always happy, always grateful. Even the Jiminy Glick stuff is born from his deep appreciation and understanding of the people in his life.

Ron Howard is also on board as producer, and James Newton Howard worked on the score, one I actually noticed and appreciated within a documentary. This just made me smile, and of course, moved me when it gets to the moment of Nancy’s death. Lawrence seems to have cut around Katherine Short as much as possible, as she’s not mentioned much, if at all in the description, yet Martin’s son Oliver is, and also participated in the documentary, as did MArty’s brothers.

The audio description, produced by Post House, and performed by Roy Samuelson, made a surprising large amount out of what it had. it is half talking head, with the interviews taking up a lot of space, but when the home videos and other archival footage starts to play, the track comes through, making sure we get the Martin Short experience all the way through.

I just loved this from start to finish. It put a smile on my face. It felt like a gesture toward Martin Short from a friend, who had gotten all of his other friends to show up and talk about and thank him for the memories. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Marty, and every celebrity would be grateful to have a retrospective as warm as Life Is Short.

Fresh: 9.0/10