This Michael J. Fox biopic gives an inside look into his career trajectory while hiding his Parkinson’s illness for seven years. We break down STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE by Davis Guggenheim in this episode, and how it juxtaposes clips of Fox acting in the context of his biographical narration, reflections from his memoir, and documentary interviews.
Sundance 2023 Section: Premieres
Distribution: Apple TV+ on May 12, 2023
From Sundance’s website: At age 16, an undersized army brat landed a part as a 12-year-old on a Canadian television show. Confident he could make it in the U.S., he moved into a tiny apartment in the slums of Beverly Hills. Three years later, he was struggling to scrape by and ready to retreat. But then came his breakout roles — Alex P. Keaton on the sitcom Family Ties and Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy — and a superstar was born. Michael J. Fox dominated the industry for most of the 1980s and ’90s, but a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease at age 29 threatened to derail his career.
Fox’s improbable story sounds like the stuff of Hollywood, so what better way to tell it than through scenes from his own work, supplemented with stylish recreations? Owning his own narrative, the actor playfully recounts his journey with intimacy, candor, and humor. In the hands of Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006 Sundance Film Festival), Still reveals what happens when an eternal optimist confronts an incurable disease.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome back to Story All the Way Down. We're continuing our series of looking at the Sundance 2023 documentaries. And today we're going to be looking at Still, a Michael J. Fox movie by Davis Guggenheim. This was in the doc premiere selection. So Davis Guggenheim previously did An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006. And this is a biopic about Michael J. Fox. And what I really loved about this was it was kind of fusing all the acting that Michael J. Fox has done throughout his career and kind of seamlessly wove it in between this narration that he's giving. Some of it may be actually coming from his autobiography that Michael J. Fox has written and narrated, but also it seems like this nice fusion between his actual story versus some of the footage that he has shot over his entire career. So, as we know, Michael J. Fox came down with the Parkinson's at age 29 years old. And I didn't actually realize that he kept it secret for about seven years, continued to work. And yeah, it was kind of a story of his life. And so, I'd love to get some of your initial reactions to it.
[00:01:21.017] Wonder Bright: It's a great film. I mean, it's really straightforward Shakespearean narrative. Man suffers a crippling, literally a crippling blow. And through the triumph of hard work, determination, sheer force of will and strength of character, and with the support of a really loving wife and family, he's able to overcome terrible odds and speak openly and plainly and with a lot of inspiration about his life and what it means to him. And it's a very entertaining film because it's made by people who know how to entertain and Michael J. Fox himself is at the crosshairs of that having come of age in public as this young, bold, bright boy who Hollywood loves and he goes on to make all of these huge blockbuster films. And so he's got this like rich personal history of achievement and success and acclaim through playing characters who against all odds overcome terrible experiences. So The way that Guggenheim and Fox welded his film clips to his personal narrative was extremely entertaining and also just heartfelt. Like it really, it really works. And I have some other thoughts as well. But what I've just said is why this film is, you know, you sent me a list this morning of the critics choices of documentaries that made the rounds at the Sundance Circuit this year. And this is at the top of their list. And I think for all of the reasons that I just described, this is why that's so.
[00:03:13.476] Kent Bye: Yeah. One of the things I was particularly struck by was seeing how much the fictional characters that Michael J. Fox is playing was overlapping with his own life because he's playing this overachiever, conservative kid of a liberal family and family ties, Alex P. Keaton. This is a breakout role and he leads up to that moment where he was really struggling and not having that breakthrough moment. But after that, He then starts to work on like Back to the Future and in the show of Family Ties, he's like this hyper conservative young teenage high school boy who's like working multiple jobs and this quintessential overachiever. But yet at the same time, he's actually working two jobs of like day and night with Back to the Future and going back to Family Ties. So I hadn't actually realized the overlap of his career in that way and also the explosive trajectory of his career. I think there's this interesting dialectic between what in astrology we would consider the sixth house of illness and how this illness started to come about, but yet he's so in his 10th house career and reputation. It does show this dialectic between how he was a bit of a workaholic and had these bouts of alcoholism. And his work-life balance of his home life versus his professional career was widely skewed, but at the same time, his family is steadfast in staying with him. And so in this film, we see this juxtaposition between Michael J. Fox at home, Michael J. Fox working, and then also dealing with this illness. And you know, turning to these drugs that are able to get him through the day, but also this secret and having to hide this diagnosis for so many years. It's seven years after his initial diagnosis, and there's a bit of him almost wanting to live in denial that this is the reality, and even to this day, still try to live his life as someone who is not being imperiled by these limitations of Parkinson's. So, yeah, what were some of your other thoughts that you had as you're watching it or thoughts that came up from what I just said?
[00:05:19.827] Wonder Bright: Well, astrologically, illness is one of those things that causes us to not be able to be fully visible in the world. I've spoken before about the 12th house as being exile and being removed and being far away. The reason for that is unlike the third house, which is short distance travels, or the ninth house, which is long distance journeys, the 12th house is not configured to the first house. And the first house is where everything happens that is good and just in life. That's like the prow of your ship, according to Hellenistic astrologers. And so you want everything to be able to see that prow of the ship. You want everything to be able to take commands from the captain and get your ship into safe harbor. And you can't do that from the 12th house.
[00:06:06.370] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to jump in and say that the first house is often referred to as the body. So it's like the life of the native. And so you're essentially saying that your vitality of your physical body of that identity, that self in houses that are not configured by these Ptolemaic aspects or not of supporting of that body or the life of the native.
[00:06:25.590] Wonder Bright: Right. And so the sixth house, which is the house of illness, is not configured to the ascendant. The first house can't see it. And so it's hidden and becomes invisible. And so there's the sixth house. We find the experiences of enslavement and illness. And so one of the first things that we experience through Michael J. Fox's story is his illness and the ways in which he keeps his illness secret. And what's interesting with Fox's chart, we have a birth time for Michael J. Fox and Lois Rodden gives it an A rating, so I feel pretty confident using it. So what's interesting when we look at Fox's chart is that he has Mars on the descendant opposing the ascendant, which Ken has just said is the body. So we have a malefic planet opposing the Ascendant, so we can see that there's harm to the body. And then we have a secondary signature of that because the Moon, which is also associated with the body, in Michael J. Fox's case, is associated with illness because it rules his sixth house. And in addition to that, it's squared by Saturn in the 12th house, which we've already talked about as the experience of exile. And isolation. So there's many ways in which Michael J. Fox's natal chart reflects the experience of illness and the difficulty of being exiled through that illness. And of course, if you know anything about astrology, then you heard when Kent said that he was 29 when he was diagnosed that he was going through a Saturn return. And since Saturn is the malefic planet in his 12th house that is squaring his moon, which rules his sixth house of illness, it's a very clear signature of someone who becomes ill at that period of time. Seven years he goes on for without revealing this diagnosis, living with it in private, dealing with it inside of his family, and trying to hide it when he's on sets. Seven years is one quarter of a Saturn cycle, so it's the seven year itch. This is a journey into a new understanding that he goes through from the time he's 29 until he's about 36, where he's like now dealing with this new body, he's dealing with this new loss. And as you pointed out, a lot of the ways that he deals with it is by denying it and not paying attention. Something that I find very interesting about the story that we've detailed thus far is not dissimilar to Katie Coleman, who is the astronaut in the film that we talked about previously, The Longest Goodbye. He is tethered to this earthly realm by his partner at home. And in this case, it really does duplicate the adventurer out in the world because his wife is I don't think she's ever actually interviewed in the film. She probably didn't want to. I would imagine they would have interviewed her if she had wanted to. But she's alluded to more than she's a central figure. And yet it's very obvious. Michael J. Fox himself is very clear that he wouldn't have been able to come through this without her. Like he expresses such gratitude and joy when he thinks about her and how she's helped him tether himself to the planet, right? Like tether himself to a world where he still has meaning. And so a large part of his ability to come back from that 12th house exile and that experience of isolation and not belonging comes from the insistence of his wife and his family that he does belong. His life, however it occurs, has meaning and that they are here at home, always waiting for him to come back and return.
[00:10:23.603] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's this recurrent theme of nonstop action and keep moving. And he, in his career, is going from one thing to the next and really just running his body into the ground in many aspects. But I'm just struck by the film's title of Still, which is as he has this illness onset, you see this tension between ways that he needs to remain still to be able to regenerate or just to not put his body at risk for as he moves around with Parkinson's, he sometimes falls down and as he falls down, he is injuring himself in different ways. I feel like as I watch this film, there's this weaving together of his public life of his films, and then we're getting the backstory of what was happening behind the scenes. And to see those two being juxtaposed in the way that everything is edited, it's almost like the fiction and the nonfiction are kind of seamlessly being blended together. And at times I'm like, what is this coming from? It was hard to source where the narration was coming from. mostly because as he was speaking on camera, it felt different than how I was hearing the narration. And it was either audio that seemed like it was maybe recorded at another time, or maybe it was just cleaned up that felt like it was a pure transmission. Or there was parts that I was thinking about, is there AI being generated? Is this AI narration? Is this AI footage that I'm seeing?
[00:11:49.290] Wonder Bright: I assumed this was him reading his memoir, that this was audio from that. They show him in several scenes reading aloud from his memoir. And I don't know when the audio book was actually recorded. I'm not sure when he actually wrote the memoir and if it even really does truly correspond with this film or the making of it. But I assume that was all from the audio book, because you're correct. When the voiceovers are matched to the films or any voiceover altogether, it's always like, you know what it sounds like after you edit me. It's cleaned up and it's a pure distillation of the intent of the speaker, which is what happens when you write a book and go through multiple iterations of editing.
[00:12:41.435] Kent Bye: Yeah, just because I had that confusion. I think by the end, I realized that there was pulling from his vast archive of different films that he had shot and seamlessly woven together. And I guess I was also just struck with how the themes of his physical life outside of the film world was mirroring the themes of the characters that he was playing. It was almost like he was giving us these secret clues amongst what he was hiding. I can't articulate exactly the different themes. I just remember watching the shows that he was being depicted in and then being juxtaposed to what was actually happening behind the scenes. And just to see that all tied together was like, wow, this is quite a transmission of his essential character that is coming through both in his life as we hear him, but also in these characters that he's playing. And so again, kind of this fusion between the fiction and the nonfiction that this film is able to do in a way that feels so seamless.
[00:13:36.808] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and it was really fun having this experience of of the man that he created in the wake of coming out with this illness. You know, I grew up with Michael J. Fox. I was probably watching Family Ties when it was still on the air. We got a TV when I was 14 in 1984. So, yeah, that would have been one of the shows that I started watching TV with. And then of course it would have seen back to the future. So he's always made me laugh, but I never, you know, Alex P. Keaton was a bit of an ass to be honest. So I never particularly liked Michael J. Fox. I wasn't a fan of him per se, but he certainly amused me and, you know, he made entertaining films. So obviously I was aware of him. You couldn't not be. He didn't start to intrigue me until I saw him on The Good Wife, which was one of my favorite shows. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, my God, who is this man? That character, the lawyer that he played on that used his illness as a weapon in the courtroom. It was all of the kind of assholery that I associated with Alex P. Keaton. But there was a thoughtfulness behind it. It wasn't just arrogance. It was wielded with a kind of intentionality, which just requires a level of thought and contemplation and self-awareness that I certainly didn't associate with him in his younger days. So I became intrigued, which was one of the reasons I was really looking forward to watching this film. because I was very curious to hear about his journey with his illness and how it had changed him. And I was not disappointed. This film will take you on that journey, give you an experience of what illness is like and the kind of havoc that it plays, but also some of the redemptive possibilities that are contained once you give up the need to be like everyone else or be the way that you once were or whatever idea it is that you have in your mind of what perfection might be or what you're supposed to be like, the way things should be. And it also, unsurprisingly, gives us some insight into how he was tethered to a world where his suffering had meaning through the people that were in his life. So, yeah, it's beautiful in those ways.
[00:15:59.200] Kent Bye: There's some scenes where behind the scenes of Spin City, he's in this green room and starts punching the walls and he's losing control of his body. He's saying that the worst thing is restraint and to be confined and not to have a way out, and there was no way out of this. setting in the reality of having to both accept it, but also talk about it and admit it and disclose it publicly. I think there was certain points where it became no longer feasible for him to keep it hidden. He would have a shake in one of his hands, I think it was his left hand, and so he would always have some object that he was holding to hide that this was happening. And so he was able to do an amazing job of hiding it for as long as he did. there's that component. And then there's the other component, I think this film and both his family and talking to his children is a part of the film, but also his wife, Tracy Pollan, who he actually met on Family Ties. And so, where she was an accomplished actress in her own right, but then went off into being more of a stay-at-home mom after they were together. And also, in some ways, just having a lot of patience for the different ways that he was just not there and absent and There's a certain part of this story that has Tracy at such a center, but we don't get to see her speaking from her own voice in an interview context. It's only in the cinema verite footage of her very patient with Michael in all these different situations, whether it's in the doctor office or at home or helping him reply to different texts or engaging with him with their children. So yeah, just to peel back that curtain to see what the life is like at home, but also her trajectory focused on her relationship with him and also her family that they started together.
[00:17:45.682] Wonder Bright: Yeah, well, it's interesting because certainly in the scenes where we actually do see her, we experience her gentleness, but also her deep humor. What we only hear third hand or experience in the scenes from Family Ties where she's introduced as Alex P. Keaton's love interest is this thing that Michael J. Fox attributes to her, which is her ability to call him on his crap. And he really gives it up for her in terms of her tenacity in confronting him with things that he didn't want to see. So her witness is not just gentle. It is also provocative and often antagonistic, I think, which again, when we look at his chart and we see that he has Mars on the descendant opposing the ascendant, that's a signature of illness, but it's also a signature of a partner who will fight you. You know, only in this instance, it's very clear that she fights for him. And sometimes that means that she has to fight with him or fight him. But she is always clearly the way that it's revealed in the film, fighting for him. And it's clearly a testament to their partnership as much as anything else. This film, in my opinion, my experience of it.
[00:19:07.172] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, it kind of washes over me in terms of as I watch it, you kind of get taken on the ride of his life, his journey. You get to see these moments of pop culture that he was involved with, but get this behind the scenes aspect of his journey as well. And I guess the thing that I'm bearing witness to is You know, there's a certain amount of his perseverance and persistence, despite all those limitations and obstacles. And I'm hesitant to that because there's a certain amount of dialectic between people who are disabled and people who are non disabled. And what does it mean to have certain constraints and limitations and to try to still live into those normative standards of what it means to have a body that is fully abled or enabled or non-disabled. And so we have him exhibiting that defiance against, you know, maybe he should have been resting for all those years. And I don't know, I feel like I'm a little conflicted in that way, in terms of what the end message is. Yeah, I don't know.
[00:20:13.640] Wonder Bright: Well, actually, I would like to respond to some of the things that you bring up, because I also have a resistance to this film. It's not In terms of my judgment about how he's comported himself, I don't know anything really very much about Parkinson's aside from having watched this film. My impression was that he got away with hiding the illness for that long. And that's why he did it, because as much as he didn't want to think of himself as being ill or like live in a world where he wasn't what he had been, quote, before, he was able to. So, and you know, this is also how he's like providing for his family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My resistance to the film comes more from the perspective of this is someone with enormous privilege. He is at the peak of success as a white straight man who is extremely lucky and successful in his career, has a wonderful family unit and all the money that he might need to deal with his illness and deal with all of those things. And so my resistance to the film is not that the film is not wonderful and great. Not that the story is not wonderful and great. Not that Michael J. Fox himself is not just a wonderful human being. It's more that it doesn't surprise me that this is the number one film on the critics list because the purity of his point of view in his privilege allows the illness to be the thing that this film is about, right? That's the suffering that this film is about. There's one intersection, the person who's living their life at the top of the food chain in Western culture, and then, oh, no, they get an illness. And if the story is about how they deal with the illness, So this is fine. Like these films need to exist. These stories do exist. And it's really good to be able to look purely at just the illness, what happens when we have a fall from grace because of illness. It is not to mitigate the pain of that expression. It's just that if somebody is also disabled from birth, is black, is queer, is blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We don't get to watch those stories because the intersectionality that is involved becomes so complex that it doesn't fit into the Shakespearean trope of the individual against the odds exerts their will and overcomes. Because you can't overcome systemic oppression. Michael J. Fox can overcome to a certain degree, the oppression of his illness, largely because it's a singular oppression that he's working with. This does not take away from who he is as a human being. Like, I like him so much now as a result of having seen this film. I'm so glad I saw it. Definitely recommend it. And I just want to acknowledge that I think the reason it shot to the top of the critics list is because It's a story that's easy to take on. It isn't complicated by a lot of things that are harder to understand if you're outside of them. We have one way into which we are going to experience our empathy. And this hero of this journey overcomes so much that there's an extremely redemptive quality to the journey that other people who are at the intersection of more difficulties are just never going to be able to achieve. So the resistance that I have to this film comes from that space where I loved the film and it's not my top 10 of these films by any stretch of the imagination because this film is extremely digestible. It follows a narrative trope that we have seen a million times since the beginning of Shakespeare. the hero overcomes obstacles and transforms. And that is a great and compelling journey, but it's not the only journey. It's far from the only journey. And there were other films that we saw this week that were much more complicated, that left me with more questions than answers, which I found extremely discomforting and yet enlarged my experience of what it is to be human in a fundamental way that this film just could not do.
[00:24:58.590] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, and I think you're articulating my resistance in some ways in such an articulate way. One of the films that you didn't watch with me was called Against the Tide, which I watched right before this. So that film was about these two fishermen who are in Bombay and one has access to capital and money and has to go into debt by tens of thousands of dollars just to go out. And both of them are having trouble getting enough fish to support not only their livelihoods, but their family. And one of the main characters has their child that has to go to the hospital, they have to sell the boat. It's basically like they're fighting for their lives. And just to see that story juxtaposed against this story, it was such a contrast between all the different layers of Western culture and the privileges that Michael J. Fox has in the film that are in this layer of assumption that are, for me, in a similar way, contrasted to these other intersections. So it wasn't on my top 10 list, and there's other films that I would probably categorize differently, but in terms of the story and the way that it is still how that element of the hero's journey, as it were, of overcoming those obstacles And I guess to go back to what I'm bearing witness to, I do want to bear witness to this tension between career and illness and the ways that Michael J. Fox is having to navigate those very real things and the ways that his body is failing him in ways that he has aspirations for what he thought he would be at a certain stage of his life. Parkinson's usually a disease that doesn't have onsets until people when they're in their 60s or 70s, their later life. He's 29 and culminating towards the peak and probably the peak would have been even later in his career had this not happened. Just to see the juxtaposition of all that footage of his life. with his story that he's telling and giving us the inside scoop of his journeys. Yeah, I thought it was really well done, but the caveat being that there's these other complex of films that also were moving me in different ways as well. And so, what are you bearing witness to in this film?
[00:27:11.560] Wonder Bright: Well, first, I need to say that we watched this film. I think this was on the second day that I joined you to watch these films. And I had sat down with you early in the week when I was not committing to watching as many as I ended up watching. That I was like, I well, I'm definitely not watching 20 days in Mariupol. And no, I'm not watching against the tide. And no, I'm not watching. There was a number of films that were tackling subject matter that I just didn't feel like I had the bandwidth for. because I could tell that they were going to be having conversations that were going to make me uncomfortable. And I just didn't want to be uncomfortable. I didn't want to have to think too much. By the end of the week, I had just like expanded into this different space where I was willing to take on these other films. But I really want to note that that like the experience of watching still a Michael J. Fox movie was I was like, Oh, this one will be quote easy. Like all the things that I just complained about were the very reason I wanted to watch it. I wanted a redemptive arc. I wanted the Shakespearean experience. You know, in Roxane Gay's book, Bad Feminist, she's talking about this thing where like you maybe want to indulge and critique pieces and material and experience material that doesn't test you, that doesn't push you all the time, you know, and that's fine. Like we also need to sometimes take a vacation. And I think it's not that the suffering that Michael J. Fox has gone through with Parkinson's is a vacation. I'm not trying to minimize his pain in any way. And to just be able to watch that classic Western heroes arc where everything is resolved in some way at the end using Hollywood film in order to produce that experience. Even when I was watching it on that second day where I was still engaged with my own resistance to having to like do too much like introspection, ho ho. Even then, it was just sort of dissatisfying in a certain way, you know, it was like, I think what I'm trying to say here is that although the redemptive heroes arc may not be the only hero's journey that we should be paying attention to, It's a way into a hero's journey. And if you are feeling bad about something and you want to have a space where you get to experience that kind of redemptive arc, this film is a good one to choose. You know, you want to watch someone overcome something terrible and that they're able to as best of their ability. And the thing that they overcome changes them fundamentally in some powerful ways that actually make them more interesting and more wonderful as a human being. This is a great film to dive into. And if you like me or somebody who is maybe resistant to some of the other films that we're talking about this week, then this might be a good one to start with. It certainly was for me.
[00:30:29.466] Kent Bye: I'm really grateful that it was helping to suck you into this vortex that I brought you into, to be able to watch all these films. As we're going through this process of going through all these films and talking about them, we're kind of documenting our own transformational journey as we are going through and seeing how our worlds are being expanded in different ways. I guess with that, is there anything else that you'd like to bear witness to in this film?
[00:30:55.200] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I want to bear witness to Michael J. Fox's deeply saturnine, self-deprecating timing and humor and good humor. You know, he's in Aquarius Rising, so he's Saturn ruled. He's another one of our second Saturn return folks that are being featured in this slew of films. and he is extremely Saturnine. His Saturn is in Capricorn because he's born in 61, so he's before the Indigo Girls, but he's still just come through all of this and now Saturn's been going through his first house as the film is being released and he's doing all this promotion. His self-deprecating humor and his ability to make light of moments through his illness where he humbles himself and therefore becomes extremely accessible is just so humbling. And it's extremely endearing. It's very endearing. Yeah, he's just wonderful. It's a great way to spend time with someone who makes you feel glad to be human.
[00:32:09.390] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's the end of this discussion of still a Michael J. Fox movie by Davis Guggenheim. It was one of the doc premieres at Sundance, and I imagine it's going to get picked up and people will be able to see it at some point, just a matter of when and where. But yeah, if you want to get more information on Story All the Way Down podcast, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and find ways that you can support the podcast. see all the different notes there. And yeah, we'll see you on the other side in the next podcast. So thank you.
