Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie - An Unflinching Close-Up of An '80s Whirlwind, Then and Now
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
As most probably know, Michael J. Fox, the likeable Canadian-born star of the hit ‘80s sitcom Family Ties and the movie Back to the Future, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1991 at the age of 29.
Fox, who turns 62 on June 6, has subsequently founded a billion-dollar foundation and become a celebrity advocate for those with the disease. He has told his personal story in four memoirs since 2004. And he tells it again to director Davis Guggenheim in Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie - a funny and serious look at a celebrity with a debilitating illness, determined to be useful.
Guggenheim, an Oscar-winner for his climate change movie with Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, employs clever editing, blending direct-to-camera interviews with Fox with off-screen narration, clips from Fox’s onscreen roles and staged reenactments from Fox’s private life.
The clips are drawn from more than 40 years of work include films as varied as Teen Wolf, Life With Mikey, For Love or Money, Bright Lights, Big City and Casualties of War, as well as such television series as Spin City and The Good Wife, and talk show and red carpet interviews. They are mostly unidentified, but folded into Fox’s narration.
For the most part, this works, though at times it feels like forced fun.
When Fox recalls surviving on two or three hours sleep a night while simultaneously shooting Family Ties and Back to the Future, we see a corresponding clip of someone asking Fox’s characters: “Are you sure you can handle two jobs at once?” If Fox talks about his period of heavy drinking after his diagnosis, we see a scene of him as a character in a bar.
Not surprisingly, the time-travelling adventures of his Back to the Future character, Marty McFly, serve as a template for this time-jumping documentary. The documentary begins with Fox’s description of waking up hungover in a Florida hotel suite in 1991 when he was shooting Doc Hollywood. His pinkie finger was twitching, which he says he later recognized as a “message from the future.”
Not long after, he figured out ways of having his characters incorporate the disease’s symptoms: In films such as For Love or Money or Life with Mikey, both released in 1993, Fox learned to hide his tremors by having his character fidget with an object. He didn’t go public with his condition until 1998, seven years after his diagnosis.
Moving further into the past, the film includes a relatively brief recounting of Fox’s childhood growing up in Burnaby, B.C., how his small stature pushed him to be funny and land a role in a CBC comedy at the age of 15, playing a 12-year-old.
There is a mention of his sometimes stern father William, an army vet and police dispatcher, who was unexpectedly supportive of Michael’s decision to move to Los Angeles at 18. He drove him there and helped him secure an agent.
Apart from a few on-the-nose music cues, Still is unsentimental and blunt in showing the effects of Parkinson’s, including bone-breaking falls and the progressive loss of the ability to communicate.
At one point, Guggenheim notes that he can see Fox’s eyes light up with a clever remark, before he struggles to get the message to his mouth and Fox acknowledges his frustration. We see him fall on the street while exercising with his therapist. He turns it into a joke when a woman passerby offers to help: (“You knocked me off my feet!”).
The archival clips are an enjoyable reminder of Fox’s ‘80s onscreen persona, as a 5’4’’whirlwind of mental and physical energy, with dazzling comic timing. His persona, and the changes he has been forced to make, include a slower pace and a new-found introspection, indicated by the film’s title.
“The thing I learned was that I couldn’t be still in my life. I couldn’t be present in my life until I found this thing that made me present in every moment of my life. It’s shaken me awake.”
As for that word “still,” Fox is still himself, still boyishly charming, and self-deprecatingly witty, though the lines feel a bit more prepared, as befits someone who is now as much an author as an actor. I liked his description of his first two years without alcohol as like “a knife fight in a closet.” In the film’s later scenes, Fox talks about his wife, Tracy Pollan, who he first met on the set of Family Ties, and who he portrays as his cynosure during his stormy journey. By the end, the documentary reveals itself to be a love story, as Pollan and the couple’s four adult children appear onscreen, teasing and talking with him, acting as both his emotional guides and resident b.s. detectors.
Though they can’t heal him, they seem determined to help him face the future with love and honesty.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is currently available on AppleTV +.