Plenty of aspiring artists spend their whole lives trying to perfect one discipline. Steve Martin has, arguably, conquered at least six. Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s, he got a job at Disneyland, where he fell in love with magic. From there, he developed a taste for stand-up comedy — by the end of the 1970s, he was among the biggest live acts in the world. In between, he wrote for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, crafted a hit single about Tutankhamun, and became synonymous with the raucous new sketch show Saturday Night Live, where he was a frequent host. Tired of the stand-up grind, he walked away and moved to movies, co-writing and starring in 1979’s The Jerk, which, adjusted for inflation, remains his highest-grossing film.
The rest is history. Over his 40-year film career, Martin has evolved from the zany absurdist of his early work to a more mature (but still funny) leading man. Eventually, he started playing dads, even though he didn’t have a child himself until late in life, becoming the pillar of family-friendly comedies. But he never stopped pushing himself or trying new things. He has been a manipulative revivalist, a soulless movie producer, a lovelorn L.A. weatherman, a dentist (twice), and a birder. He has primarily worked in comedy, but he’s no stranger to dramas and thrillers. He’s done a lot, and a lot of it very well.
In honor of STEVE! (martin), Apple TV+’s new documentary about the comedian, we’ve ranked all of his film performances. (However, we’re skipping over his voice work in Home and The Prince of Egypt — and we didn’t include his stints as the host of the Academy Awards, which are crucial to understanding what a smart, sophisticated humorist he is.) Honestly, focusing on just Martin’s big-screen roles is to merely scratch the surface of what he’s achieved as an entertainer. There are also the hit plays, the beloved comedic essays, the wistful novellas, even his terrific acceptance speech in 2013 when he received an Honorary Oscar. He’s won five Grammys — most recently for his bluegrass music (that’s right, he’s also pretty good with a banjo) — and in 2016 he was nominated for Tonys for his musical Bright Star.
Yet even without all that, looking at Martin’s filmography reveals a Renaissance man. His movie career is a reflection of the ambition and adventurousness that he’s exhibited across his career. From manic absurdist and menacing enigma to delightful dad and endearing love interest, he has never stopped changing and never been afraid to try a new role.
37.
Mixed Nuts (1994)
A disaster of a Nora Ephron comedy in which Martin leads a group of volunteers called the Lifesavers, who answer phone calls from the depressed and suicidal over the holidays. That doesn’t sound funny in theory and is even less so in practice, particularly with everyone in the cast (including Adam Sandler, Garry Shandling, Jon Stewart, and Rob Reiner) mugging so manically, as if they know the material is weak so they have to wring every possible laugh out of it. They are not successful, and you can see Martin checking out by the end of it, knowing he’s wandered into a dud.
36.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
Few remember Martin was part of this nightmarishly ill-conceived staging of a Beatles rock opera by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, but that did happen, honest. (George Burns is the narrator!) Martin plays Dr. Maxwell Hammer, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the level of wit and thought in this production. This is Martin in the campiest version of his “wild and crazy guy†character, and we’re pretty sure you can see every bead of sweat here.
35.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
The movie itself has its moments — it’s basically Joe Dante trying to do Space Jam — but Martin, who plays the evil Mr. Chairman, the head of the ACME corporation, is a way-too-silly villain in a movie that probably needed the bad guy to dial it back a bit rather than try to out-cartoon the cartoons. Bill Murray is funny in Space Jam because he’s oddly zen about the whole playing-basketball-with-Michael-Jordan-and-Bugs-Bunny thing. But Martin thinks he’s Daffy Duck here. You can’t out–Daffy Duck Daffy Duck.
34.
Sgt. Bilko (1996)
Martin always bounced back and forth between more personal projects and big-studio jobs, and this is one of his more cynical brand-name gigs, taking Phil Silvers’s classic TV role as the sergeant who tries to wisecrack his way through a career in the Army. Martin phones it in and, frankly, in today’s military-industrial age, it seems downright insane to watch a movie about an army sergeant who chills out in silk robes and plays golf all day. The year 1996 has never felt further away.
33.
The Out-of-Towners (1999)
The original Out-of-Towners had a pleading, obnoxious, gloriously weaselly Jack Lemmon as an Ohio man falling apart on a trip to New York City for a job interview, with Sandy Dennis as his wife. This entirely extraneous remake has Martin and Goldie Hawn in the same roles, but Martin doesn’t have the anger or the exhaustion of Lemmon. He and Hawn just plod through a series of calamities without much wit or invention. Martin can play midwestern, but he can’t play a midwestern rube: His Henry Clark acts like he’s just a regular guy in the big city, but c’mon: We know you’re a big-city guy, Henry. You’re Steve Martin!
32.
Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies (2006, 2009)
It’s an uphill climb to try to take on the most famous role of a brilliant comic like Peter Sellers, and it’s probably smart of Martin not to even try that hard. He basically just does a French accent and trips over some things. Martin keeps his dignity intact, but he’s still not particularly funny, and this whole thing feels like a crass cash-in rather than Martin playing homage to a comedy legend. The one upside: The brief moment in human history that Steve Martin and Beyoncé did a scene together, in which Martin shows the exact wrong way to dance to Beyoncé.
31.
Tom Baker in the Cheaper by the Dozen movies (2003, 2005)
Martin started to settle into a bland, comfortable spot as America’s older dad in the early aughts, as best exemplified by the Cheaper by the Dozen movies, which are really posters (Martin looking haggard while surrounded by children) made into movies. So inoffensive as to barely register at all, these films are over before you even quite realize they started. These are the type of movies that add Eugene Levy for the sequel to “shake things up.†(This is exactly what they did, in fact.) It was difficult for us to stay awake writing this capsule, so we can’t imagine how difficult it was for Martin to drag himself through these. The movies were, of course, both huge hits.
30.
Bringing Down the House (2003)
Another of Martin’s family comedies, this one at least has the benefit of Queen Latifah, who brings tons of energy to an ugly stereotype role as the escaped convict who convinces Martin’s divorced Wasp to help her by posing as a perfect online match. There are a lot of groaning, problematic “racial†jokes in the film that wouldn’t fly today and shouldn’t have flown then, but at least Martin seems to be having fun with Latifah, who lets him play the straight man to her exuberance. It hasn’t aged well, but that’s not Martin’s fault.
29.
The Big Year (2011)
Just what America wanted: a comedy about three guys who are part of a massive yearly competition to see who can identify the most species of birds. This box-office bomb, which costars Jack Black and Owen Wilson, has its share of sweet moments, and Martin is quite comfortable playing a rich Manhattan CEO who faces retirement by taking part in what’s known as a Big Year, finally pursuing a passion he was always too busy to fully enjoy. The Big Year captures Martin in kinder-gentler mode, but the film’s overall modesty keeps him from really registering.
28.
My Blue Heaven (1990)
Martin has a hard time playing characters who aren’t demographically and ethnically exactly like Steve Martin. He is so steeped in irony and mockery that he always just looks like Steve Martin doing a sketch. That was never clearer than in My Blue Heaven, in which Martin portrays Vinnie Antonelli, a former mobster in the witness protection program who moves to the suburbs and makes milquetoast neighbor Rick Moranis miserable. Originally, Martin was supposed to play the neighbor and Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to play the mobster, and that might have been fun. As is, Martin doesn’t bring any menace to the role. He just does a funny accent and wears a fancy suit and just looks like Steve Martin playing dress-up.
27.
Housesitter (1992)
Another joint with Goldie Hawn, one that works better because Martin stays out of the way and lets Hawn do all the work as a con artist who poses as Martin’s wife before, of course, they end up falling in love. Martin spends the entirety of Housesitter reacting to Hawn’s crazy antics, and they have a palpable, vanilla chemistry. But this is another of those run-of–the-mill Steve Martin comedies in which he plays a buttoned-down character, the understated straight man. It’s not our favorite of this comic genius’s cinematic guises.
26.
The Lonely Guy (1984)
An early attempt to turn Crazy Stand-Up Martin into Romantic Comedy Lead Martin doesn’t entirely work — Roger Ebert, who later came to love Martin, wrote that the sight of him in this movie “inspires in me the same feelings that fingernails on blackboards inspire in other people†— but this was one of the first signs that Martin was a little bit more of a populist and straightforward leading man than his previous work might have suggested. He hadn’t quite wiped the smirk off his face yet, and the movie is mostly pretty soggy, but it’s a definitive signpost in his career. Martin didn’t just want to be the edgy comic anymore; he wanted to be a star.
25.
A Simple Twist of Fate (1994)
Martin has never hidden his literary ambitions, adapting classic works for his screenplays. That’s proved very successful for him (Roxanne), but not always. A Simple Twist of Fate, based on Silas Marner, stars Martin as a divorced man who has closed off his heart — just in time to have a seemingly abandoned young girl show up at his door, needing him to care for her. Predictably, this will give the man a chance to Learn How to Love Again, and while it’s intriguing to see Martin do melodrama, the results always veer closer to “interesting†than “deeply rewarding†or “actually good.†For Steve Martin completists, A Simple Twist of Fate will offer some small insights into what happens when the writer-actor doesn’t quite pull off what he’s trying to achieve.
24.
Novocaine (2001)
Martin tried to go a little darker in this pseudo-thriller about a mild-mannered dentist (Martin) who gets involved with a psychotic patient (Helena Bonham Carter) and ends up thrust into a web of murder and betrayal. Martin handles himself fine, but Novocaine is a total mess, more a stylized Tarantino knockoff than a movie that has anything particularly original to say. Still, we’ll watch Martin in this rather than another “wacky†studio comedy any day.
23.
Joe Gould’s Secret (2000)
Around this point, Martin was starting to get a little literary cred — his acclaimed novel Shopgirl came out the same year — and was clearly going after the New Yorker demo with this small role. Martin plays a book publisher fascinated by the story of Joe Gould, a 1940s Greenwich Village eccentric (played by Ian Holm) chronicled by great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (played by Stanley Tucci, who also directed). He fits in well as a literary bigwig, but he’s gone before you quite realize he’s there.
22.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016)
Ang Lee’s ambitious but deeply flawed war film, which aimed to show off the potential of shooting at 120-frames-per-second, doesn’t do Martin any favors; he plays a Jerry Jones–like NFL owner welcoming home some local Iraq War veterans as a cheap marketing ploy. Lee incorporates a lot of uncomfortably intimate close-ups to emphasize the vibrancy of the high frame rate, but all it does, as Entertainment Weekly memorably put it, “is [present] poor Steve Martin’s face like a topographical moon map.†It’s a jarring, unflattering look, which completely distracts from the fact that this is a rare dramatic role for Martin, who captures the character’s smug, disingenuous patriotism.
21.
The Man With Two Brains (1983)
The follow-up to a better, more clever, more successful movie that Martin and Carl Reiner did a year earlier (which we’ll talk about a little later), The Man With Two Brains stars Martin as the world’s greatest brain surgeon with the world’s silliest name, Michael Hfuhruhurr. His melancholy widower ends up being tormented by a conniving gold digger (Kathleen Turner) while also falling in love with a disembodied brain (voiced by Sissy Spacek) being stored in the lab of a mad scientist (David Warner). This very goofy premise, which is partly a spoof of old science-fiction films, is a tad icky in its attitude toward women’s bodies and brains. Nonetheless, Martin cranks up the wacky meter in this one, and it never stops being funny to see him say “Hfuhruhurr.â€
20.
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Orson Welles, Carol Kane, Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Telly Savalas, Cloris Leachman, Mel Brooks: The Muppet Movie had its share of memorable cameos. Martin gets about two minutes of screen time as a snotty waiter who serves Kermit and Miss Piggy while on a date. This was when Martin was still best known as the super-arch stand-up sensation, so he doesn’t actually give a performance — it’s more like an ironic impression of acting like a waiter. But it’s pretty funny to see him snark up the place, especially playing off that unflappable frog.
19.
Baby Mama (2008)
It’s not surprising that Martin would become pals with Tina Fey. Both smart, cutting comedic writers and performers, they worked together on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. But in Baby Mama, Martin is especially funny as Fey’s exasperating boss, Barry, the hippie-dippie CEO of a health-food grocery store. Fey didn’t write this uneven comedy, but it’s got some of the same sophisticated satire of big-city elites that 30 Rock exudes, and Martin has a ball playing a pompous numbskull who doesn’t know that ponytails have been over for more than a decade. In his early career, Martin would have probably portrayed Barry as broadly as possible — here, he amplifies the character’s ridiculousness by underplaying every ounce of his serene stupidity.
18.
Pennies From Heaven (1981)
Martin was devastated that this Herbert Ross musical — in which Martin plays sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker, who escapes into his fantasies of tap dancing in 1930s musical numbers — was a commercial flop. He blamed the audience for not being ready for him to play a dramatic role. Martin actually learned to tap-dance for the part, but it’s worth noting that while he’s fine in the film, he still hadn’t quite figured out how to turn off the comedy face; as good as he is, he is sort of distracting in the role. It’s still worth a revisit.
17.
George Banks in the Father of the Bride movies (1991, 1995)
Becoming a bankable nice guy, Martin had success with the 1991 remake of the endearing Spencer Tracy original about a reluctant dad who’s anxious about losing his little girl to marriage. Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride Part II require little heavy lifting, and Martin is strikingly decent and sweet. Plus, he and Diane Keaton have such warm onscreen chemistry that they feel like an old, happy married couple. Are these movies pretty disposable? No doubt. But, hey, at least they helped Brad Paisley meet his future wife.
16.
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)
An inventive spoof dreamed up by Martin and Carl Reiner, this sendup of ’40s-noir films actually splices Martin (in character as private investigator Rigby Reardon) into famous films of the time, including Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep. It’s a one-gag movie, and eventually the gag grows a little tired, but it’s a funny idea, and Martin has a grand time with it. This was one of the first hints that the crazy stand-up comic sensation might have something a little bit more on his mind than absurdist gags.
15.
Three Amigos (1986)
Right before Martin transitioned away from zany roles to slightly more mature, realistic parts, he teamed up with Chevy Chase and Martin Short for this wonderfully stupid comedy that he co-wrote with Lorne Michaels and (no kidding) Randy Newman about clueless movie stars who travel south of the border, being mistaken for their brave “Three Amigos†silver-screen personas. A satire of Hollywood ego and American myopia, Three Amigos goes a long way on the strength of Martin’s deadpan brilliance. His Lucky Day is a perfect idiot, so impressed with his own celebrity and inflated self-worth that he has no idea he and his pals are about to square off with a dangerous (and definitely not pretend) bandit. And it’s the movie where he first met Short, who has remained one of his closest friends for nearly 40 years.
14.
Roxanne (1987)
The film that announced Martin as a major screenwriter and actor — at least for mainstream audiences used to him in sillier fare like The Jerk and Three Amigos — Roxanne established his bona fides as a solid, sensitive romantic lead. Taking its cues from Cyrano de Bergerac, the film stars Martin as Charlie, a regular guy with a big nose who’s in love with Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), an astronomy student who has a thing for a hunky dolt (Rick Rossovich) on Charlie’s firefighting crew. Because it showed off a warmer, softer side of Martin at the time, critics and audiences perhaps overreacted a bit in their praise. (The National Society of Film Critics gave Martin its Best Actor prize. The Writers Guild awarded him Best Adapted Screenplay.) That’s our gentle way of suggesting that Roxanne … doesn’t entirely hold up. Martin is still pretty winning, but the film (and his performance) is a little too pleased with itself. Rather than a revelation, Martin in Roxanne is, in hindsight, just in the beginning of a strong second act in his film stardom.
13.
Leap of Faith (1992)
Of all the different roles Martin has tackled, Jonas Nightengale might be the most compelling outlier. A traveling evangelist happily suckering the faithful out of their money, Leap of Faith’s protagonist could be seen as a dark commentary on Martin’s career as an entertainer: Jonas is nothing but a slick con man with utter contempt for an audience that’s easily wowed by razzle-dazzle and smooth talk. There are elements of a stand-up and a magician to the character, and Martin burrows into the guy’s self-loathing in ways that feel like the actor is exorcizing something out of himself. Sadly, Leap of Faith isn’t nearly as compelling as Martin is — the movie becomes a paean to genuine faith and requires Jonas to grow a conscience — but the film stands as an intriguing and candid look into the performer’s dark side.
12.
It’s Complicated (2009)
In It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep has to choose between Alec Baldwin (her horny ex-husband) and Steve Martin (a nice-guy architect). The movie is, for better or worse, typical Nancy Meyers porn — Martin’s character is redesigning Streep’s already-gorgeous home — but the actor is so calmly confident as a divorcé on the rebound that it’s a shame he hasn’t tried more conventional rom-com roles. But then you remember, oh right, Hollywood tends not to make those about characters over age 35.
11.
Shopgirl (2005)
Based on his well-reviewed 2000 novel, about a millionaire who starts dating a Neiman Marcus employee, Martin gives one of his most layered dramatic turns in this affecting big-screen adaptation, which he also wrote. He has hinted that the material is somewhat autobiographical, which might explain the depth of feeling that comes from his portrayal of Ray Porter, who vies for the affections of Mirabelle (Claire Danes), who’s also smitten with the artsy screw-up Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman). Ray has Martin’s erudite, cosmopolitan sophistication, but on the whole, he’s an unhappy, distant figure, and it’s tempting to read Shopgirl as some sort of confession about the secret loneliness of a beloved, successful figure who remains unfulfilled.
10.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
A con comedy inspired by 1964’s Bedtime Story, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels answers the trivia question: What’s the only role played by both Marlon Brando and Steve Martin? DRS follows two-bit hustler Freddy (Martin) as he squares off with Michael Caine’s Lawrence (David Niven in the original) for the affections (and bank account) of a seemingly easy mark (Glenne Headly). There’s a broad, easy chemistry between the two male leads — Caine is all smug refinement; Martin is all plucky cockiness — that makes up for the movie’s predictable twists and conventionality. DRS was at the end of the period when Martin would do this kind of go-for-broke physical comedy, and he’s a scream when Freddy assumes his alter ego of the imbecile Ruprecht. But maybe even better is that classic moment when Freddy is in jail early on in the film and is trying to remember Lawrence’s name. Every time we can’t pull a movie title from our fading memory bank, we think of this scene.
9.
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Martin’s demented dentist has some legit menace to him: In many ways he’s as scary as that oversize human-eating plant. His big musical number is Little Shop of Horror’s showstopper, and years later it’s Martin who you remember the most from it. This is also, oddly, the only time Martin and Bill Murray, contemporaries in every possible way (including as David Letterman guests), ever worked together on the big screen. They made it count.
8.
The Jerk (1979)
In his terrific memoir, Born Standing Up, Martin recalls working on his first major film, a very silly and stupid comedy that he starred in and co-wrote. “Our goal in writing was a laugh on every page,†he explained, later adding that the collaborative process of a movie made him realize he could walk away from his lucrative but exhausting and restricting stand-up career. “Movies were social; stand-up was antisocial … It was fun to have lunches with cast and crew and to dream up material in the morning that could be shot seven different ways in the afternoon and evaluated — and possibly perfected — in the editing room months later.†That may sound rather highfalutin for a film as proudly juvenile as The Jerk, but there’s a clear intellect at work — a couple of ’em, actually, since it’s directed by co-conspirator Carl Reiner — that informs Martin’s spot-on performance as an overgrown man-child idiot who goes on an oddball journey to find himself. Navin R. Johnson is a fool, but he’s not mean-spirited, and that combination of lovability and naïveté has informed plenty of big-screen stars since, including Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell.
7.
All of Me (1984)
This screwball comedy, in which a rich widow (Lily Tomlin) accidentally has her soul put in the body of her still-living lawyer (Martin), isn’t talked about much anymore. But it’s a rollicking good time, with Martin able to mix his gift for physical comedy (he somehow seems to understand how Lily Tomlin walks) with a nice little love story. Martin has called All of Me his first “mature†film, and you can see what he means: The movie is serious-minded and sincere in a way most of his hadn’t been up to that point. It’s sort of a shame he and Tomlin never hooked up again: They’re perfect together.
6.
Bowfinger (1999)
Perhaps Martin’s most underappreciated movie (and the last purely comedic screenplay he ever wrote), Bowfinger stars Martin as a low-budget, sleazy, anything-to-make-the-movie producer who decides he’ll create a whole film featuring a superstar (Eddie Murphy) without ever telling said superstar he’s in the movie. Bowfinger is a tremendous showcase for Murphy — who plays two characters as well as he’s ever played one — but don’t forget Martin, who has both the chutzpah and desperation of a guy who knows he’s too old to keep scrapping like this but loves the business too much to leave. This is basically Martin’s Broadway Danny Rose, with more laughs than pathos.
5.
The Spanish Prisoner (1997)
A David Mamet movie is expected to feature ping-ponging conversations between characters who talk in stridently direct, slightly stilted ways to each other, as if all the niceties of human interaction have been stripped away so that people can just be brutally real with one another. It takes a certain actor to make Mamet’s dialogue ricochet, and Martin proved to be one of the best at it in this underrated thriller. He plays Jimmy, a rich, mysterious stranger who befriends our hero, Joe (Campbell Scott), who’s come up with a potentially lucrative “process†for his bosses. Martin’s comedy has often focused on his affected superiority to those around him, but in The Spanish Prisoner, he makes that smugness feel lethal. Because this is a Mamet movie, we know there’s a con going on, but we can’t figure out just what, and Martin keeps us ill at ease, even as Jimmy and Joe become closer friends. Martin hasn’t played a ton of villains in his career — maybe he was waiting for one this razor-sharp.
4.
Parenthood (1989)
Steve Martin didn’t become a father until his late 60s, a decision he insists he doesn’t regret. (“I think if I’d had a child earlier,†he said, “I would have been a lousy father, because I would have misplaced my attention on my career.â€) The irony, of course, is that he’s had a great Hollywood career playing dads in the Father of the Bride and Cheaper by the Dozen movies. But his finest father role is as Gil, the anxious, perfectionist patriarch at the center of Parenthood. This isn’t necessarily his funniest, sharpest, most nuanced, or most dramatic performance, but it may be the most relaxed and relatable that he’s ever been onscreen, happily plugging into an ensemble in which each of the characters in the Buckman clan is dealing with his or her own little crisis. At a time when TV dramedies like thirtysomething were becoming fashionable, Martin delivered a rich mixture of comedy and pathos as a good guy who just wants to do right by his kids and his emotionally withholding father (Jason Robards). And because Gil is constantly convinced he’s failing those around him, there’s little question what a great son, brother, dad, and husband he actually is.
3.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
Slow-burn exasperation at its best, Martin is a terrific aggrieved Everyman in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, a great comedy about how horrible people are and how terrible holiday travel can be. As Neal, an uptight advertising exec trying to get home for Thanksgiving, Martin had the great fortune to team up with John Candy, who plays the most insufferable of backslapping strangers who just wants to help you out and get to know you better. Their contentious rapport powers John Hughes’s rollicking-then-touching road movie, both sides of this comedic duo perfectly suited to their individual assignment. Candy probably gets the bigger laughs, but PT&A reveals how good Martin is at being the straight guy, a role he’d embrace the longer his career went along. Not that Martin isn’t incredibly funny as well — seriously, the guy just wants a fucking automobile.
2.
Grand Canyon (1991)
Widely believed to be modeled after action-movie producer Joel Silver (the Lethal Weapon and Matrix franchises), Martin’s character in this ensemble drama is Davis, a soulless Hollywood big shot who makes a mint off gory shoot-’em-ups. (“I thought it was ludicrous,†Silver later said of Martin’s performance. “I don’t want to be caricatured.â€) It’s in keeping with Grand Canyon’s touchy-feely, reactionary tone that, of course, one movie producer is meant to represent all that’s callous and obscene in our culture, but Martin’s trick was to make Davis a smart, funny guy who knows exactly what he’s doing and just doesn’t care. That Davis is shot during a mugging is meant to be grimly ironic — the purveyor of mindless violence gets a taste of his own medicine — but Martin and director/co-writer Lawrence Kasdan are pretty wise about the character’s phony insistence that he’s going to change his life and stop making mindless blockbusters. Of course, the pledge proves false — Davis really is as shallow as he always seemed — and Martin does some of his most understated work in this depiction of an everyday shit who’s too rich, powerful, and self-involved to concern himself with the garbage he pumps into the world.
1.
L.A. Story (1991)
One of the strengths of Martin’s career has been its consistency, but if you had to pick one year that was his absolute peak, look no further than 1991. On December 20, he was in Father of the Bride, one of his biggest hits. A week later, he was in Grand Canyon, delivering one of his best dramatic performances. And that was all after L.A. Story, which had come out around Valentine’s Day of that year. Martin’s stab at a West Coast version of Manhattan — a love story that captures the particular contours of the city where the main characters reside — L.A. Story is very much like the metropolis it chronicles. It’s pretentious, filled with contradictory impulses, overly proud of itself, but also deeply insecure. And, oh yeah, it’s really funny. Written by Martin and directed by Mick Jackson, the film features the finest encapsulation of Martin’s overlapping ambitions. His Harris K. Telemacher is a sarcastic goofball with a big heart, a guy who believes in love but is also painfully aware of how often it goes wrong. The character articulates the mixture of cynicism and sweetness, highbrow and crude, biting and sincere that’s essential to understanding Martin’s genius. As Harris tries to navigate a shallow relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker’s ditzy SanDeE*, and a more mature and rewarding one with Victoria Tennant’s Sara, Martin essentially says good-bye to the silliness of his earlier career for a more mature and sustaining artistry. L.A. Story may not be his most beloved film, but it’s the one that feels closest to his heart. (He and Tennant were married at the time.) One of the great things about Steve Martin is that there are many different ones to choose from as your favorite. This one is ours.