This is very hard to watch.
Even so, director Davis Guggenheim’s quiet little documentary is impressively inspiring.
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| When asked to describe longtime companion Tracy Pollan in a single word, Michael J. Fox replies, "Clarity." |
Michael J. Fox is cherished as the adorably brash kid who charmed us during seven seasons of TV’s Family Ties in the 1980s, concurrent with his explosive big-screen success with Back to the Future.
Watching him here, in the throes of full-blown Parkinson’s — a diagnosis he received at age 29 — is painful. Yet this is the way he wants his story told, in a documentary with a script he adapted from his four books, starting with 2002’s Lucky Man: A Memoir. He refuses to go quietly into that good night; he has been passionately public about coping with this disease, and equally dedicated to helping other sufferers.
To date, his Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, founded in 2000, has raised more than $2 billion, in great part because of his brave visibility.
But he wouldn’t call it “brave,” as this film makes abundantly clear. It’s simply the right thing to do.
More to the point, as he admits here, the diagnosis turned him into a “tough son of a bitch.”
Guggenheim’s approach is a clever blend of talking-head documentary — laden with liberal dollops of Fox’s often snarky and self-deprecating humor — archival footage and scripted elements. Clips from Fox’s many film and TV roles often “stand in” for actual dramatic moments during his life and career. The result is equal parts memoir and reflective “summing up” of a life lived not always perfectly, but ultimately nobly.
It’s all quite a feat, for an undersized Canadian high school dropout.
This film begins portentously, with a flashback to 1990, on the morning Fox woke in a Florida hotel and realized that the pinkie finger of one hand had taken on a life of its own. “It wasn’t my finger,” he recalls. “It belonged to somebody else.
“The trembling was a message from the future.”
This film’s title is deliberately ironic, with multiple meaning. Thanks to Parkinson’s, Fox most often is unable to be still; as the recitation of his life begins, he recalls that his 2-year-old self — who “weighed little more than a slippery beach towel” — never was still. He also didn’t “grow,” in the conventional sense; when he was 6, and his younger sister 3, people thought they were twins.
He was always the smallest kid in his school class, relentlessly targeted by bullies, and — when he hit high school — veering down a dangerous path of smoking, drinking and “serial fender-bending.” Solace came with his discovery of drama class, which fueled an insatiable desire to truly embrace acting.
When the Canadian TV series Leo and Me entered production in 1977, and a call went out for a young actor to play the title character’s 12-year-old nephew, Fox — at 16 — knew he was a lock … because he looked 12. Indeed, he got the part.
Two years later, Fox’s father drove his son to Hollywood — expensing the entire trip on a Visa card — and the young actor began to make the rounds.
He spent three years securing nothing but one-off bit parts in TV shows and a couple of movies: nowhere near enough to maintain anything close to a decent living in his flyspeck Hollywood apartment. (No kitchen. He washed dishes in the shower.)
Then Fox — literally down to no money — heard about Family Ties, which was just going into production.
Unfortunately, the show’s creator — Gary David Goldberg — wasn’t sold on him. Even worse, NBC entertainment division president Brandon Tartikoff really didn’t want him, infamously proclaiming that Fox was “not the kind of face that you’ll ever see on a lunchbox.”
(Somewhat unexpectedly, Fox and Tartikoff subsequently became good friends. A few years later, Fox presented his NBC boss with a lunch box bearing his smiling face, inscribed “To Brandon: This is for you to put your crow in. Love and kisses, Michael J. Fox.” Tartikoff kept it in his office for the rest of his television career.)
A few seasons into Family Ties, Back to the Future came along (and I’ll not spoil the details of how Fox landed that gig, because the story is priceless).
Unfortunately, both productions overlapped.
As Fox relates here, a Teamster would collect him at his apartment at 9:30, and whisk him to the Family Ties set, where he’d work until 6 p.m., when another Teamster would drive him to the Future shooting set, where he’d work all night, usually until 6 a.m., when he’d be driven home. Then the first Teamster would arrive again at 9:30 a.m. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sleep? You do the math.
So, yes, in the immediate aftermath of Back to the Future, Fox became something of a jerk. That didn’t last too long, thanks in great part to Tracy Pollan, who joined the Family Ties cast during the fourth season. (That, too, prompts a delicious anecdote that I’ll not spoil here.) They married in July 1988, and are together to this day, with four grown children.
These “looking back” sequences are intercut with present-day footage of Fox struggling to navigate his daily routine, frequently assisted by his trainer/therapist, Orser. Some of their work is done on public sidewalks, where, as Fox admits, “The walking thing really freaks people out.”
He falls. Constantly. During the course of making this documentary, he badly broke one hand, and seriously injured his head and one eye.
“Part of the deal is that I fall,” he explains pragmatically. “Gravity is real.”
He’s amused by people who tell him to be careful.
“I never set out not to be careful.”
Guggenheim’s final shot is one with which we’ve become familiar: Fox in medium close-up, sitting on a chair. The camera holds … and holds … and we suddenly realize, in this lingering moment, that Fox finally is still.
Fade to black.
Like, wow.
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