“I’m not pathetic,” declares actor turned activist Michael J Fox early on in this intimate, uplifting and frequently very funny documentary about his life. “I’ve got shit going on. I’m a tough son of a bitch.” On the evidence presented here – a dazzling collage of interviews, dramatisations, snappily chosen film and TV clips, family footage and narrated biography – it’s hard to disagree.
Having achieved stardom in his early 20s, Fox found himself in his 30s hiding from, and then publicly facing up to, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease – a condition that he believed (as many do) only affected older people. As he says with genuine surprise: “I was not someone who was supposed to get this.” Yet as we learn from this wryly defiant portrait by Davis Guggenheim, whose documentary CV includes the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and the empowering He Named Me Malala: “Some people would view the news of my disease as an ending, but I was starting to sense that it was really a beginning.”
As a child, Michael Fox (the “J” was added later as an actorly affectation) was always on the move, constitutionally unable to sit still. It was partly that kinetic quality that landed him teenage roles in TV shows such as Leo and Me in the 1970s, although it wasn’t until he finally bagged the Alex P Keaton character in Family Ties in the early 1980s that his career became anything to write home about (Fox hilariously remembers Robert Redford flossing his teeth throughout his failed audition for the 1980 awards winner Ordinary People).
Initially a supporting player, Fox became the star of Family Ties thanks to his electrifying comic timing – a scene-stealing ability to make the softest of gags land with a bang. No wonder producer Steven Spielberg pursued him for Robert Zemeckis’s sci-fi comedy Back to the Future, which they had already started filming with Eric Stoltz, and that Fox wound up reshooting around the edges of Family Ties. A punishing three-and-a-half months of “confusion and exhaustion” followed that left Fox wondering: “How could any of this shit be good?”
Looking back on the whirlwind success that followed (Back to the Future and Fox’s “B-grade high school werewolf movie” Teen Wolf held the two top spots at the box office), our self-effacing subject notes: “I was king of the world, [but just] playing a part.” In the reflective present-day interviews, he sports a bruised face after breaking his cheek on the furniture, and explains: “It’s part of the deal that I fall. Gravity is real, even if you only fall from my height.” It’s a great one-liner that harks back to his earliest awards acceptance speeches (“I feel four feet tall!”) and reminds us that Fox’s wit has only got sharper over the years.
As anyone familiar with his written memoirs will know, Fox’s self-deprecation extends to connecting the “diminished blinking and reduced spontaneity of facial expression” of Parkinson’s with the appearance of “a growing comfort in front of the camera – less mugging and hamming it up”. It’s a “tough son of bitch” indeed who can conclude they weren’t getting “better”, just “sicker”, and speak with such candour about the acting tics and drug regimes they employed to hide their symptoms. While frenetic illustrative clips show the energetic young Fox running and jumping his way through Back to the Future and Casualties of War, Guggenheim here mines lesser-known films such as 1993’s The Concierge (AKA For Love or Money) and the TV hit Spin City to illustrate how Fox kept his hands occupied to stave off tremors on camera.
The real revelations, however, lie in the depiction of Fox’s family life, most notably his marriage to actor Tracy Pollan, who first won his heart by calling him “a complete fucking asshole”, and whose unswerving love leaves him all but speechless when he’s asked what she means to him, save for one word: “Clarity”. Ironically, while the symptoms of Parkinson’s may create the impression that Fox is never at rest, his relationship with Pollan and their children seems to have finally granted him the stillness he never had. As with the singer Edwyn Collins and his wife, Grace Maxwell, in the wonderful 2014 doc The Possibilities Are Endless, we’re left with the feeling that what we are really watching is a great love story. “How’s Tracy?” Guggenheim asks Fox in one unguarded moment. “Married to me,” he replies, before adding with perfect timing: “… still.”
In selected cinemas and on Apple TV+
