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.”
