Michael J Fox Is Still Standing

Still Life

This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news. Today: Still — A Michael J Fox Movie.

A LYRICAL LINE in the Apple TV synopsis of Still: A Michael J Fox Movie reads — “What happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease?”. Over the course of David Guggenheim’s 94-minute documentary, we see one of those two conditions getting cured. As the 61-year-old Michael J Fox narrates his story with refreshing candour, the first thing we notice is the personality of the Hollywood star who has become synonymous with Parkinson’s disease. Despite his struggle with physical and verbal control, his spirit is disarming. He doesn’t hide behind his witty puns and wry sense of humour. The progressive neurological disorder is there for everyone to see; the crippling symptoms, scars and quaking hands are clear as daylight. Falling for him is an expansion of breathing. By being so naked, Fox radiates a very specific and rare kind of positivity — the sweet spot between courage and pragmatism. You sense he wasn’t always like this. It took a lifetime to get here.

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The transformation is palpable. When Fox speaks about his life, he sounds like a survivor. But not the kind we tend to usually attach the term to. He looks like someone who was once infected with reckless optimism — the sort that slowly mutates into a vicious cocktail of delusion and denial. When he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the young age of 29, at the peak of his acting career, he hid the disease from not just the world but also from himself. He disguised it behind a series of on-screen tics and wall-bouncing energy; if he pretended it wasn’t there, perhaps it would go away. He drank, slogged and partied to keep the demons at bay. It’s this toxic positivity that Michael J Fox ultimately defeated — not so much the challenges of living with Parkinson’s itself — when he came clean nine years later. He not only retired early, he became an advocate for Parkinson’s, testifying in front of Congress for research funding, and joining Muhammad Ali as an immovable face of moving conviction. It’s not a stretch to say that Fox embraced the irony of trading facial expression for cultural impression.

What the documentary gets so well is the language of this healing. How do you examine a person who was cured of blinding optimism? By juxtaposing the frank image of who he is today with the heady mask of who he used to be, the film reveals his evolving relationship with himself. His film and television career made him good at ‘acting’ like nothing was wrong. And remarkably, it’s moments from those (fictional) roles that are seamlessly spliced with archival footage, dramatic recreations as well as vignettes of his present existence. Somehow, almost everything he narrates — his hyperactive childhood in Canada; his struggles as a teen actor in Los Angeles; his big break in television (Family Ties) and film (Back to the Future); his meteoric rise to fame; his marriage and family; his crushing diagnosis — has a perfectly corresponding scene or dialogue, making it seem as if Fox were subliminally choosing roles that channelled his pent-up feelings.

It’s a classic artist trait, but one that finds great resonance in terms of the social symmetry between documentary and subject. By letting him craft his story through stories that highlighted him, Still correctly implies that Fox’s truth was always ensconced in the deepest corners of his work. It echoes the spoofy device used by Netflix’s Movies That Made Us, except Still rarely makes it look like a device. It feels like an act of reclamation by a man who rediscovers his agency to be the protagonist.

Guggenheim doesn’t just merge hindsight with plain sight, he prompts Fox with answers disguised as questions. There’s a sense that the maker understands the subtext by simply watching the man. I like that Fox’s long-time wife, Tracy, appears after we’re left to process the loneliness of his condition. For the first half, we only see Fox with his film-maker, his physiotherapist, his doctor and his memories. It’s a manner of suggesting that having a partner who doubles up as a caregiver is the ink on his pages; she’s such an organic part of his sentences that her presence doesn’t need to be romanticised. When the film opens with a recreation of a hotel-room moment in 1991 — back when Fox first realised that something was wrong with his body — there’s affection about the way he words it: “My trembling was a message from the future”. Immediately, it’s apparent that Guggenheim isn’t afraid to mesh Fox with his massive pop-cultural footprint. Perhaps he stops just short of naming this documentary ‘Back to the Future,’ which might have been just as poignant and perceptive as Still.

Which brings us to the title. The self-awareness and storytelling genes of Fox are rooted in a line he says early on: “The irony is that I couldn’t be still as a kid, until I could no longer stay still”. His elevated emotional muscle allows him to detect the lighter side of the Parkinson’s paradox: A restless performer cursed with paralysed facial muscles and twitching body muscles. In a way, he lends inertia the tender dignity of stillness. Yet, it’s not just the physical state that the title riffs on. The duality of the word quietly bleeds into the form of the documentary. The fact is that Michael J Fox is still standing. He is still alive. He is still around. He is still a father, husband and celebrity. He is still speaking, reminiscing, advocating and accepting. He is still starring in a movie that’s an extension of who he is. And we are still watching.

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