Comedian Steve Martin now comes as close as he’s ever going to get to opening up about his life, his thoughts and his feelings in this absorbingly detailed two-part Apple documentary by director Morgan Neville. Part one is conventionally autobiographical, with archive clips and family photos and Martin’s own sonorous, ironic voiceover covering his painful childhood: failing to please his strict dad and then the extraordinary, 15-year battle to make it as a standup, finally becoming a colossal stadium-level success in his mid-30s powered by smash-hit TV appearances on David Letterman and Johnny Carson. America loved his wacky, formless but almost childishly innocent and in many ways old-fashioned routines – a world away from the tougher commentaries of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor.
Part two shifts from first-person to third-person; there’s no voiceover commentary, but a series of interviews with Martin in his home, solo, or with his wife Anne Stringfield or buddy and performing partner Martin Short – a documentary style closer to the celeb-on-celeb podcast or Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. This second half is about the more chequered, but nonetheless consistently lucrative and eventful career in movies into which he pivoted in 1979, leaving behind forever his wild-and-crazy-guy standup persona. And it was at this stage that audiences saw in big-screen closeup that unsmiling face, an opaque expression of alienation and loneliness under the iron-grey hair. (As Short says, he hasn’t aged because he looked 70 at 30.)
The first half fascinatingly shows how Martin was deeply influenced by his childhood job working at Disneyland, more important than any school or college: selling the theme park paper and then working in the magic shop. He just spent all his off time wandering around the enchanted kingdom and was thrilled by in-house Disneyland comedian Wally Boag who played the Golden Horseshoe Revue. Really, so much of Martin’s act – the arrow through the head, the bunny ears, the balloon-folding – came from Boag and from the goofy amateur-hour magic-act routines he learned and performed as a kid. (Playing the banjo seems to have come a bit later, but we don’t hear exactly when he picked that up.) The second part covers that section of his life in which he has evolved into being a dry, if slightly precious New Yorker humorist and returned to live performing with Short (with whom he’s enjoying a bona fide TV hit with Only Murders in the Building).
Glumly, Martin broods on the world of cinema. He owns bound screenplay copies of all the films he’s ever appeared in and says that he had to do 40 films to get five good ones, though not saying which they are. The box office disaster of his 1981 film Pennies From Heaven – sadly no mention of the Dennis Potter BBC TV classic it’s based on – was a terrible experience for him, his first brush with the hurtful, arbitrary cruelty of Hollywood: quite unlike the slog of playing disagreeable venues as a young standup, in which you could at least feel you were on an upward path, learning your craft. Martin says himself that his movie career seems to have no story, just a collection of anecdotes. He felt he’d outgrown his standup life, and yet perhaps he outgrew it into something less mature and interesting.
This is a thoroughly watchable, intimate and intelligent portrait, although Martin can still be cagey when it comes to family. His young daughter isn’t shown and he doesn’t quite tell us everything about his father Glenn, who could be so hurtful and so dismissive about young Steve’s showbiz dreams. Only late on in the documentary are we told (indirectly) that Glenn once entertained acting hopes himself before going into real estate; there are photos of him as a young man which appear to come from stage performances. Yet the film doesn’t enlarge on this.
As for the legendary standup set on which Martin’s legend rests … perhaps you really did just have to be there to watch him capture lightning in a bottle. His live show reached its nirvana when he would lead the audience out of the theatre into the street, improvising wacky alfresco events, taking the crowd into fast-food joints and ordering hundreds of burgers, and on one occasion getting everyone to climb into an empty swimming pool and let him crowd-surf overhead. It was surely one of the great moments in comedy history.
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