Summary
The Death & Life of Lamar Odom doesn’t seem like an Untold story at first, but it reveals itself to be an honest and faintly terrifying exploration of crippling addictions.
At first blush, The Death & Life of Lamar Odom doesn’t seem like the typical Untold documentary. Sure, the life of former NBA star Lamar Odom, especially in relation to his extremely high-profile marriage to Khloé Kardashian, had plenty of scandal, but not of the same kind that usually defines this series in films like Shooting Guards and The Fall of Favre. It isn’t about something Lamar did inasmuch as it’s about a pattern of behaviours that have persisted in various forms throughout his entire life, long after the point where, in the ordinary arc of addiction, they might have stopped.
And there is an arc to addiction, a process of trauma, self-destructive behaviour, and then, hopefully, support and healing that eventually leads to the process of sobriety, a one-day-at-a-time navigation of life through the lens of an addict in recovery. Various mile markers dot the arc; a moment of profound discomfort – in Lamar’s case, the loss of his infant son, Jayden, who passed away from SIDS on June 28, 2006 – followed by a worsening spiral and then an intervention and a recovery. At some point, there is the obligatory “enough is enough” moment, which for Lamar Odom would be the twelve strokes, six heart attacks, and coma he suffered after being found prostrate in a Nevada brothel.
What director Ryan Duffey creates in this film is a timeline of addiction that completely subverts this digestible, almost cliché narrative, in so doing painting a fascinating portrait of substance misuse that is rarely depicted at all, much less in association with celebrities. That more truthful summary of Lamar’s life reveals a complex disorder stemming all the way back to his childhood in South Jamaica, Queens, where he was the son of a heroin addict and a mother who died of colon cancer when he was only twelve. And it continues past the point of Lamar’s miraculous recovery from his coma, nursed diligently by his wife, who found him smoking crack at the edge of his bed, having immediately resumed the destructive habits that almost killed him.
There’s a bracing honesty to all this that makes The Death & Life of Lamar Odom unusually powerful, especially in the context of similar sports documentaries that generally only choose to profile an addict once they have sustainably achieved sobriety. Lamar hasn’t. The process is still very much ongoing, which is the point. Substance use disorders always work this way; one never truly “heals” from them, merely learns to manage them one day at a time, but the human tendency to apply linear patterns to things, combined with our urge to myth-make, especially around those in the public eye, creates a need to frame the story of addiction in a prescriptive way. In its rejection of that, the documentary becomes a much more surprisingly frank consideration of its subject than I ever expected it to be.
In the same way, its recounting of Lamar Odom’s sports career, its trajectory, highlights, and minor disgraces, avoids falling into the trap of asinine sporting biography. The structure of his time in the NBA becomes an explanatory factor, something that kept his worst impulses at bay, even while the money and celebrity compounded those very same impulses. In another bold flourish, Odom himself recounts most of his own story, with embellishment from other key figures in his life, including the most commercially noteworthy, Khloé Kardashian. Little is made of how the profound neurological damage from so many strokes, not to mention the substance misuse itself, might have shaped that testimony. There are no disclaimers. This is Odom’s story in his own words, a story that, we’re reminded often, is still unresolved.
