3 out of 5

Directed by: Brent Hodge, Derik Murray

It’s effective at reminding us of how magnanimous Chris was, and does a convincing job – via interviews with family and friends – at making us truly believe that that wasn’t too removed from Chris in real life: go big or go home, deprecating, humble, and overcoming it with big and bold guffaws.  But it doesn’t dig too deep, in order to keep the vibe mostly celebratory; while we don’t need to spin anything intro controversy or darkness, the film almost seems to tip-toe around Chris’ drug use, to the extent of interviewees using careful phrasing to refer to that aspect of Farley’s life.  It seems purposefully edited as such out of respect; it also relegates ‘I Am Chris Farley’ to a well-made ‘best of’ clip show, though I can’t say what else I expected it to be.  In truth, there was so little of Farley’s life that wasn’t being a showman – and that didn’t have him playing his particular overblown role – that you really don’t have the liberty a doing some full tumultuous tour of a celebrity’s life.  And I can appreciate how detouring that down too much drink and drugs would actually seem exploitative.

The takeaway: what we saw was pretty legitimate.  And re-seeing it, I laughed again, even though I’ve seen it countless times before.  So the energy everyone speaks to which Chris emanated was a very real thing, and ‘I Am Chris Farley’ mostly serves to drive that home.  It can’t be a penetrating documentary, nor is their a full lifetime of hills and valleys to explore, but it’s a rewarding – though tinged with sadness – reminder of how awesome it was to be there to see this happen in real time, and that we’d probably still be laughing at variations on the same gag if Chris could have super-humanly figured how to survive those ghosts which dragged him to his end but also pushed him to make everyone smile.