Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom

The Long Shadow of the Paint

I remember, vividly, the way Lamar Odom used to move on the court. It wasn’t just athleticism; it was a kind of liquid grace, a man of his size—6'10", wide-shouldered—moving with the delicate touch of a point guard. When I watched him in the early 2000s, I saw a player who seemed entirely at home in his own skin. That’s why sitting with Ryan Duffy’s *Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom* feels so disorienting. The man on the screen, reflecting on the ruin of his own life, is a stranger to the one I saw sprinting down the Staples Center hardwood.

Duffy’s film doesn't try to solve the mystery of Odom, which is the smartest decision he makes. Instead, it presents a catalog of absences. We see the Odom who was a champion, the Odom who was a reality television side-character, and the Odom who nearly died in a Nevada brothel. But the film is most effective when it stops talking about the "Lamar" of the headlines and focuses on the stillness of the man in the chair.



There is a moment about halfway through where the editing rhythm slows down. Duffy cuts away from the archival clips—the shouting crowds, the flashbulbs, the TMZ headlines—and just lets the camera linger on Odom’s hands. He’s speaking about the haze of his addiction, the way time just stopped mattering. He plays with a ring on his finger, his thumb rubbing the band over and over. It’s a small, nervous tic, but it tells me more about his recovery than the talking heads explaining the toxicology reports ever could. His voice has lost the booming confidence of his playing days; it’s softer now, almost cautious, as if he’s afraid the wrong word might knock him off balance again.

I find myself wrestling with the documentary’s relationship to the media circus that defined his later years. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk. Does the film critique the voyeurism that fueled Odom’s public decline, or does it participate in it? There’s a lingering discomfort in how the film juxtaposes his personal tragedies with the glitzy, high-definition aesthetic of reality television. At times, the film feels like it’s struggling to reconcile the serious nature of the subject with the trashy, sensationalized medium that eventually consumed him.



Critics have often argued that these sports documentaries treat trauma as a narrative arc rather than a life experience. As *Variety’s* assessment of the genre once noted, "the danger of the athlete biography is the assumption that the redemption is the point, rather than the endurance." This is precisely where Duffy succeeds and fails. He isn't interested in a tidy ending. He understands that Odom’s life isn't a story with a moral; it’s a long, messy process of putting pieces back together that were never meant to be broken.

The film is at its weakest when it leans into the "tell-all" structure. We don't need the play-by-play of the Kardashian marriage; we lived it. We watched that footage cycle through our feeds until it became white noise. What *is* compelling, though, is the contrast between the Odom of the past—the smiling, gregarious teammate—and the man who now talks about the silence of a hospital room as if it were a physical place he still inhabits.



There is a finality to his posture that haunts the frame. He slouches, his frame seemingly heavier, dragging the memory of his past failures with him. Maybe it’s my own projection—I grew up watching him, after all—but there’s something deeply sad about seeing a man who was once so physical, so *present*, now defined entirely by what he’s managed to survive.

Whether this documentary is necessary is a question for someone else to answer. For me, it’s a mirror. It asks us to confront how we consume the people we put on pedestals, and how quickly we dismantle those same pedestals when the foundation cracks. I’m not sure if Odom found the peace he’s looking for by the end of the runtime, but by letting him sit in that silence for just a few seconds longer than comfortable, Duffy makes sure we have to sit with it, too.