In Still, Michael J. Fox Is Determined to Keep It Moving
Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, one of last year’s best, opts for honesty over sentiment.
It may be a new year, but we’re not ready to close the book on 2023 quite yet. All week, Vulture critics will be offering recommendations for the programming they loved last year but didn’t have the bandwidth to cover.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is about forward motion. It’s also, obviously, a portrait of Michael J. Fox, the beloved actor, a man with Parkinson’s disease and the world’s most famous advocate for a cure for that disease. But director Davis Guggenheim makes it clear from the very beginning of this clear-eyed, honest, and cleverly edited Apple TV+ film that he understands the through-lines in Fox’s life.
“Before Parkinson’s,” Guggenheim asks his subject early in the movie, “what did it mean to be still?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Fox responds, looking directly into the camera. “I was never still.”
In sequences that braid together snippets from Fox’s movies, cleverly shot reenactments, archival media footage, and the sound of Fox reading from his own memoirs, Guggenheim illustrates the extent to which the Back to the Future star has always been in a hurry to get somewhere: as a 2-year-old ducking out the back door of his house to toddle to a nearby candy shop; as a young actor shuttling back and forth between the sets of his hit sitcom Family Ties and the Robert Zemeckis blockbuster that made him a huge star; as a husband and father fleeing the reality of his Parkinson’s diagnosis by zipping off to shoot more films far away from home.
Now that he’s dealing with a much more advanced stage of his condition, Fox’s biggest challenge remains willing himself to decelerate. Throughout the documentary, we observe Fox working with a trainer to help him manage his walking and other movements. “Just slow it down,” the trainer advises over and over again. But eventually, Fox’s impulse to speed up gets the better of him, as evidenced by an early, bracing moment when Fox, strolling down a New York City street, says hello to a fan, loses his balance, and falls hard to the pavement. His trainer assists him and the fan offers help, too, while Fox, ever the comic actor, laughs it off, telling the admirer, “You knocked me off my feet.”
Given the subject matter of Still, one of the best documentaries of 2023 and one that has been shortlisted for an Academy Award, it would be very easy for it to turn into a treacly, melodramatic piece of hero worship about the triumph of the human spirit. (Cue the “sha la la” from the Family Ties theme.) To the credit of both Guggenheim and Fox, it refuses to do that. True, it is hard to watch Fox’s unrelenting determination and feel anything other than deep admiration. But the movie is not demanding anyone feel that way nor straining to jerk tears out of its audience. It is matter-of-fact, even when those facts aren’t necessarily flattering to its subject.
Which is why Fox readily admits that he was “a bit of a dick” after the success of Back to the Future and that he fell in love with his Family Ties co-star and future wife, Tracy Pollan, because she was the only person who would tell him he was an asshole to his face. A commitment to candor is also front and center every time Fox displays the injuries he keeps incurring from falling in his home and banging into furniture. Still does not gloss over the toll that Parkinson’s takes. It shows us the bruises and broken bones.
Like its subject, Still keeps things moving with an assured attitude that is deliberately evocative of the kind of ’80s movie that might have starred Fox. Guggenheim imaginatively curates scenes from various Fox films and television shows and behind-the-scenes footage from Family Ties to place us in the moments that Fox’s narration describes. In some ways, it’s a time-travel movie about one of the most famous time travelers in movie history.
Guggenheim’s storytelling approach also underscores how intertwined Fox’s private and public personas are and how impossible it is to disentangle them. Everything Fox has in his life — his wife and their four children, the ability to use his platform for the sake of medical progress, his capacity to pay for outstanding care — all stems from the fact that he had so much success as an actor, something he can no longer pursue with the same vigor. Fox explains to Guggenheim that because of Parkinson’s, even when he’s very emotionally moved, he can’t always fully express that on his face anymore, a fact that adds a poignancy to moments when we see him with Pollan and their children and he can’t suppress a huge smile.
Then there’s the cognitive dissonance that comes with being such a high-profile figure with a degenerative disease, something Fox speaks to after a particularly painful round of physical therapy.
“It’s this Michael J. Fox stuff,” he tells his trainer as if he’s referring to someone other than himself. “People express to me that I make them feel better, that I make them do things they couldn’t otherwise do. That’s the most powerful thing you could ever feel, and that’s a huge responsibility. And I don’t want to fuck it up.” It’s rare to hear someone like Fox, a celebrity revered for his seemingly unbreakable positive attitude, talk about what a blessing and a burden it is to publicly struggle with a disease. There’s also an urgency to such moments that feels very much in keeping with the movie’s focus on kinetic energy. If Still is a time-travel movie, it’s also a movie about how precious time is.
About 25 minutes into the documentary, Guggenheim asks Fox another question: “Why do you wanna tell this story right now?” Again, Fox pauses for a few seconds to consider.
“My world is getting smaller,” he finally says. “I love my mind and the places it takes me and I just don’t want that to get cut short.” Still is uplifting enough to suggest that Fox still has some time ahead of him. But it’s also realistic enough to make it very clear that no one knows how much. It’s a film about living as fully as possible, because the prospect of your own mortality makes you want to do anything but keep still.
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