Available on Apple TV+ Friday, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Tenacious. The Michael J. Fox Story) focuses on the daily life of the actor with Parkinson’s disease, while revisiting his past. Signed Davis Guggenheim, this inventive portrait on the formal level and moving on the human level incorporates many excerpts from Fox films with reconstructions of passages from his life. Ingenious, the process has, among other effects, that of making you want to dive back into the filmography, more complex than one might think, of this actor who made the forecasts lie by becoming an essential star of the 1980s and 1990s.
Michael Andrew Fox was born far from Hollywood, in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1961. His father was a Canadian Army veteran and his mother, a payroll clerk and actress. A profession for which son was hooked very early on, appearing as a teenager in Canadian series and commercials. As soon as he came of age, he left to try his luck in Los Angeles.
At 18, penniless, he auditioned under the name of Michael Fox, but his small stature prevented him from being considered for the roles of young first. In 1980, he appeared in the teenage comedy Midnight Madness (midnight magic), and in 1982, in the future cult film Class of 1984 (The class of 1984).
The same year, the tide turned in his favor, and not just a little. Despite the opinion of one of the producers, who, precisely, finds him too small, the one who has just changed his name to Michael J. Fox since “Michael Fox” was already taken obtains the coveted role of Alex, the Republican son and curator of the Keaton clan in the sitcom Family Ties (1982-1989).
Michael J. Fox’s comic performance worked to such an extent that his character became the driving force behind the NBC series which, at the height of its popularity, was watched by a third of American households.
Early triumph
However, this television notoriety comes within a hair’s breadth of derailing the actor’s film career before it even begins. Indeed, when director Robert Zemeckis offered him the role of Marty McFly in the whimsical comedy Back to the Future (Back to the future), the bonzes of NBC refuse to lend “their” star, very taken by the recordings of Family Ties. Another actor is hired (Eric Stoltz) and then fired, and in the meantime, a compromise occurs between NBC and Steven Spielberg’s production: roughly speaking, Michael J. Fox will shoot the sitcom by day, and the film by night.
In 1985, the success of Back to the Future, where Fox is transported to the past and must make sure his “future” parents fall in love, is phenomenal. First at the North American box office, the film is followed in second place by the horror-fantasy comedy Teen Wolf, which also stars the actor, as a werewolf middle schooler. All this, while Family Ties continues to dominate in its television niche.
Fox is then the incarnation of the “ preppy » bon chic bon genre that it is good to present to parents. In the review of Back to the Future of HollywoodReporter, it is written of him that he “seems intelligent”. It’s a compliment, of course, but for the status of romantic hero, we’ll come back. In 1987, Fox proved he could be The Secret of My Success (The secret of my success). In this Cinderella iconic Wall Street version of the Reagan era, a young woman succumbs to his charms, and before her, a more mature woman. Here again, he makes the preconceptions about him lie.
A dramatic actor
It is also at this time that the professional choices of the actor become interesting. In fact, from 1987, we observe an alternation of light films, in phase with the status of adolescent idol enjoyed by Fox, and serious films. Thus, to The Secret of My Success succeeds Bright Lights, Big City (The lights of the night), about a cocaine-addicted aspiring journalist.
This tension between the darling of teenagers and the “serious” actor is never more apparent than in 1989, with the successive releases of the remarkable Casualties of War (Victims of Vietnam), which crashes, and mediocre Back to the Future Part II (Back to the Future II), which brings in a fortune. In the first, Fox is a haunted veteran who denounces the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman committed by his brothers in arms, and in the second, he reconnects with the spatiotemporal escapades of Marty McFly.
Accumulating lower receipts, despite Fox’s love rating, these films with dramatic content are fascinating because the actor, in addition to freeing himself from the comic register to which he nevertheless owes his fame, is clearly trying to to break there the neat image that sticks to his skin because of (or “thanks to”: this is the paradox) Family Ties.
After the success of Back to the Future Part III (Back to the Future III) as well as the modest successes of The Hard Way (play hard), where he brilliantly portrays a film actor full of himself, and Doc Hollywoodwhere he plays a superficial surgeon, comes a succession of flops: Life with Mikey (The childhood of art), For Love or Money (Caretaker), Greedy (The hungry heirs).
Upstream, Michael J. Fox received, at the age of 29, the terrible diagnosis that we know, and it is the prospect of not having much longer to be able to work that pushes him to accept some of these projects. His doctors predict ten years of professional activity for him. To them too, Fox will prove wrong.
A last leading role
In 1996, when he managed to develop various subterfuges and tics aimed at hiding the symptoms of his illness, such as tremors, from the camera, Fox found one of his best roles in The Frighteners (ghost hunters), by Peter Jackson, produced by none other than Robert Zemeckis. As a dishonest ghost hunter, but who has a real gift, Fox combines the comic and dramatic registers that he has, throughout his career, sought to reconcile, with what is more in the background a plethora of special effects as at the time of Back to the Future.
Tasty supporting roles will follow, as in The American President (The American President) And Mars Attacks! (Mars attacks!), but it is in The Frighteners that he will hold his last first role in the cinema.
The stardom is not over, however, testifies to the TV series Spin Ciyou (1996-2001), where Fox plays a harassed deputy mayor of New York. Still on the small screen, he continues to take pleasure in scratching his image, whatever he does, endearing: in the series The Good Wifehe portrays an unscrupulous lawyer who shamelessly uses his illness to attract the sympathy of the court.
One can only be admiring in front of the determination of Michael J. Fox to refuse the facility. Aware that the public would follow him in a certain register, Fox could have taken pleasure in it. He who, with his youthful features and his slender physique, was not promised stardom, on the contrary took the risk of displeasing. This, with the same constancy and the same stubbornness that we see him display, at 62, in the face of Parkinson’s disease. Respect.