Let’s cut to the chase (something this documentary doesn’t do). It’s 4 ½ hours long. Four and a half hours. Devoted to Garry Shandling. Documentaries on the Civil War are shorter.
Not that it isn’t well done and filled with diary entries and behind-the-scene footage – but 4 ½ hours? Really?
Let me save you some time. Garry Shandling was a very talented guy who was always miserable, always searching for happiness, could be difficult to deal with, kept journals, achieved a certain level of success in the world of comedy, and was the creative force of the sometimes brilliant cult hit HBO series, THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW. In some ways it was a groundbreaking show. But for all his success, Garry Shandling remained tortured.
Does it require 4 ½ hours to tell that story? Judd Apatow, who is notorious for churning out good work that is always marred by excessive length, outdoes himself here. I suppose if you’re a huge Garry Shandling fan you could easily sit through 6 hours of footage of colleagues saying over and over he was complicated and generally unhappy. But if you’re the average person, even if you were a Garry Shandling fan (which I was), I wonder if 4 ½ hours might be a tad much (like by half).
Even the excellent PBS documentary on Walt Disney, who was one of the most influential cultural forces of the 20th Century and created an entertainment empire that was groundbreaking in many areas – from animation to television to theme parks – even with home movies never seen before and a career that spanned forty years leaving behind a legacy that may last hundreds of years – that documentary was only 4 hours. THE SORROW AND THE PITY was 4 hours and 25 minutes. Garry Shandling’s life required more time than that?
And the result is the documentary does Shandling a disservice because the length might scare off people who otherwise might tune in. And what’s more important – tracing his life in day-to-day depth, or attracting more people who might for the first time appreciate him and his contribution? I bet you could do a two hour documentary and not feel cheated.
from By Ken Levine
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