Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Grade: A-

A documentary like Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie brings back a smorgasbord of memories. Even writing this now makes me think of more. I don’t know about you, but I wanted to BE Michael J. Fox – certainly around the turn of the last decade of the old millennium. Freshly liberated from the ties of family and time-traveling, he was free to soar in great movies like Doc Hollywood – and I even liked The Hard Way. He played likable characters, eventually to a fault. Got to do the coolest action scenes. Catapulted to amazing success (what’s his secret?). And was so good-looking, an aspect that I don’t see brought up often. And by all reports I’ve seen, has remained a nice guy and a class act.

He publicly came out about his Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis in 1998, and suffered silently for a handful of years before that. Some people weren’t born yet to remember when he was still, so to speak. “I’ve never been still,” he tells us in Still: A Michael J. Fox movie. He’s always been very active, from shoplifting candy as a child to famously taking on shooting Family Ties and Back to the Future simultaneously, living on coffee and 3 hours of sleep a night. One night while filming Family Ties for a studio audience, he was freaking out backstage because he “can’t find the video camera” – a prop from the mall parking lot scene in Back to the Future. He’d lose track of which set he was on.

Before going public with the news 25 years ago, he got resourceful at camouflaging the tremors in his left hand, by often having an object in that hand he could fidget with. Or he would have it in his pocket. The documentary cleverly inserts bits of scenes from his movies and shows to illustrate the point currently being talked about. Many of them are uncannily on the nose.

Director David Guggenheim wisely eschews the usual talking heads that weigh down movies like this. No interviews with friends or co-stars. We mainly just see him, his family, and various physical therapists. They appear to be a beautiful family with so much love, and gentle off-color ribbing and roasting, instead of Hallmark sympathy. His wife Tracy Pollan gives him a hard time about all the texts he hasn’t responded to, and he retorts with “whattaya think those would look like if I wrote back?” When they play Pictionary, he is the one appointed to do the drawings, believe it or not.

He will turn 62 next month. This film will remind you of how funny he is. He takes longer to get to the punchlines of his one-liners, but somehow, with losing a lot of expression in his face, they land effectively. It is endearing to hear him cuss; he drops a surprising amount of F bombs. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is extremely moving, no pun intended. If you think that remark is insensitive, well, I got it from him. He says it in the movie.

Grade: A-