Editor’s Note: Even though his time in Park City may be over, Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is still plugging away at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival program. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
I’m sure a lot of online people around my age can remember the first time that Michael J. Fox was ill. Though most knew he had Parkinson’s, we were a bit too young to enjoy Spin City when it was airing and his diagnosis became public knowledge – most of us came to adore him through the Back to the Future films, or if you had cool parents or a stomach for horror, The Frighteners — so when he appeared in a small teaser for a BOTF reunion in the early days of the teens, shuddering and twitching from the Parkinson’s, hearts sank. How could someone so vibrant and alive, with so much left to give to those close to him and the world at large, be struck with an ailment so uncommon and so devastating? One can litigate the unfairness of this universe in celestial courts with Vincent Price and Ronald Coleman. However, the confines of this review are limited to a discussion of Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a new documentary about Fox that is a great testament to what making lemonade from life’s lemons can do for one’s soul.
Contrary to the one smoothed-and-polished side of Fox’s struggle that we glimpsed through his work and public appearances, his path was torturous. Over the course of the doc’s 90-odd minutes, he goes in-depth about the pain, and not just in the physical sense: how he coped with alcohol (though he’s now been sober for about as long as I’ve been alive), his ad-hoc symptom management through favored hands and popping pills, and his incandescent rages at his body refusing to respond to his commands. All of this stemmed from one root, which was that he was understandably afraid for his life and embarrassed, scared to think that one day the momentum he’d built over the course of his career would grind to a halt and that the audiences wouldn’t understand or that they’d stop laughing. It’s part career summary, of course — Director David Guggenheim takes a pretty swell approach to this, using clips from Fox’s films as well as recreations to assemble the vignettes that Fox narrates from his autobiography or the interviews he granted to Guggenheim — but the real meat of this is documentation of Fox’s day-to-day life. It is as tragic as it is illuminating seeing Fox discuss his medication management and perform his physical therapy, all the while retaining his quick wit and refusal to quit.
This is an aspect Guggenheim excels at, connecting the strands of a person’s life into a cohesive narrative. The rupture of Fox’s diagnosis is a development that only somewhat alters his character: the same person who struggled alone in LA until landing Family Ties, pawning his furniture to afford Big Macs and bus fare, refusing to quit, is now the one struggling to regain his full range of motion in his gait. One could see it as the natural resolution of the process of grief — his story, as presented here, fits the five steps like a glove — but it also is the tale of a person learning to be comfortable with himself, satisfied with what he has (a loving family, means) while doing what he can for his own condition and others afflicted as he endures hell itself. The title is not nearly as punny as it seems at first blush: Still, ultimately, is about self-continuity no matter one’s condition and the stillness that inner peace, no matter if one has their bad days or not, can bring to a restless and unsatisfied soul.