Michael J. Fox may have had a career more notable on television than in film, but the world of movies has been on a M.J.F. kick lately. First, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in November at the Academy’s Governors Awards. And on Friday, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Part touching look at Fox’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease and part feat of editing that reconstructs Fox’s life via playfully assembled scenes from his movies and TV shows, “Still” belies its title just as surely as Fox’s life did. This is a film in constant motion, a jumpy assemblage intercut with scenes in which its subject describes his life before and mostly after his early-’90s diagnosis.
It’s heart-wrenching at times to see the wildly personable star of “Family Ties,” “Spin City” and “Back to the Future” wrestle with a diagnosis about which his neurologist told him straight out, “You lose this game.” But Guggenheim and Fox and the many hands who shaped this film prefer not to dwell on the plight that is admittedly the reason the movie exists; they’d rather summon up a lightness of tone by the use of those clips and through Fox’s own methods of both dealing with Parkinson’s and dealing with talking about Parkinson’s.
He may describe himself, even at the height of his fame, as “an acid bath of fear and insecurity,” but Fox’s default mode is amusing self deprecation; when he talks about Parkinson’s, his tendency is to downplay it and joke about it. (Speaking as the writer of the 1988 GQ cover story that is shown onscreen in the film, I can testify that he defaulted to self-deprecation back then, too.)
To his credit, Guggenheim calls out Fox late in the film for his tendency to be dismissive. The director (and interviewer) points out that in their hours of conversations, the actor had never described himself as being in pain from the disease, even as he talked about the broken bones he’d suffered from falls.
“I’m in tremendous pain,” Fox admits with a shrug.
That kind of honesty surfaces occasionally as the movie runs through Fox’s career, which seemed headed for disaster (out of money in Los Angeles with no work) and then overnight turned into glory (landing “Family Ties,” becoming a giant TV star and then simultaneously making “Back to the Future” at night). “I had a really, really good time,” he admits, while also conceding that those good times included way too much alcohol and other assorted recklessness.
Once he found out about the Parkinson’s after a particularly brutal hangover (he thought) in Florida, he continued to drink to excess, while also spending hours in the bathtub and trying lots of tricks to hide his condition from the people he worked with on TV and in films. He learned about it in the early 1990s but didn’t disclose it publicly until 1998, establishing the Michael J. Fox Foundation two years later. “Still” doesn’t go into much detail about the foundation; Guggenheim may be known for serious issue-oriented docs like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and “He Named Me Malala,” but in this case he preferred to stick first with Fox’s work and later with his family life.
If there’s a hero in this story, it’s Fox’s wife, actress Tracy Pollan, who won his heart by calling him “a f—-ing a—hole” after he made a joke at her expense, and who clearly continues to take care of him without putting up with his nonsense.
There are times when the narrative approach of “Still” — throwing a barrage of film clips at his bio — can become distracting rather than entertaining, but it’s always a kick. Besides, there are enough visits with Fox’s family and enough open conversation with the man himself to bring us back to the real story, and the real moral: “I couldn’t be present in my life until I found this thing that made me be present in every moment in my life.”
