Still

“Recycling Time in the Hybrid”

Cathy Lee Crane (Ithaca College)

You do not need to be a fan of the films and television projects starring Michael J. Fox to be taken in by Still, the documentary tracing his life with Parkinson’s. In fact, the film works its magic precisely because of how deftly it utilizes the detritus of his media oeuvre. Fox left home before college, became a child star in Hollywood, and by the age of 29 years-old was at the top of his professional life as an actor. To be diagnosed at that age with Parkinson’s, what Fox himself thought was an old person’s disease, is not most anyone’s story.

Fox was slow to accept that this might be one situation he would not be able to outrun. I suppose when your body converts most involuntary acts into voluntary ones, you might finally understand that life could indeed be a cosmic joke. When my own father was diagnosed in 2008 at the age of 74, he was still very active. We called him the Energizer bunny. During the last decade of his life, I experienced the pathways of Parkinson’s: its manifestation through physical symptoms and the less visual terrain that close family and caregivers inhabit as we enter into intimate dialogue with our beloved’s decaying “executive functions.” Monitoring, guiding, holding, slowing. The world gets smaller when one’s attention is on every single action: the rising from a chair, the taking of a step, the first word that starts a sentence of speech. By the time I was directly confronted with Parkinson’s, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research had already staked a claim on getting the facts straight while ramping up research to understand the progression of neural decay responsible for the symptoms. The beauty of this cinematic portrait is that Fox hasn’t lived according to the storyline of being crushed by disease. Fox wanted “to own his own narrative.”

To tell this story of the careening collapse of self-control is not easy when you have a protagonist so unstoppable. But Michael Harte, the editor of this film, has made a masterful tour de force out of Fox’s own film and television appearances. These clips do not merely serve as illustration but are played out as symptoms themselves. Still could be accused of trading in the clichés structuring biographical point-of-view around direct address interviews and re-enactments. But in this documentary, these elements are interwoven with clips from his work shown at first in chronological order only to recur, in fragments, as if the film bends back around on itself to that moment when Fox discovers that his hand has an energy of its own. As it turns out, the story of this life can only be told in the sequential logic of moving backward in time,” as Fox’s most famous character once did.

The centrifugal nerve center of the film’s structural logic is the medium closeup of Fox staring down the camera, which holds him in long takes; long enough to endure the seconds of pause after he takes a pill, after having his hair fixed, or before a surprising and self-deprecating one-liner. This is a film about slowing down…even in our own patterns of viewing it. The film looks through the roles Fox played to trace the phases of how his own life was lived. (It helps that his real-life wife Tracy Pollan was a love interest in Family Ties). Watching this film is like sifting through an archive to discover something other than what the material may have been originally intended to convey. It is uncanny what a perfect parallel his fictions were to his facts. In this film, they unmask one another. Unlike the hybrid that the art world seems hell-bent on reifying, this is not a film designed to obscure or delight in its own opacity. This film repeats itself in order to see if we see that same image of the light out-of-focus the same way again. Which in turn provokes us to look again. Closely. This recurrent time pressure is exactly what Parkinson’s itself demands.

Fox confesses that what Parkinson’s confronts him with directly is reality, which he defines as: “to be present in every moment of one’s life.” Indeed, even if in that moment I want to turn off the television and sit on a park bench with my mother near a butterfly garden, which I would do right now if she didn’t live in Arizona and we weren’t in the unprecedented scorching heat of another layer of our climate changing and fossil fuels of domestic air travel weren’t even just a little less unforgiveable than having children in the carbon footprint self-assessment. The whirligig of contemporary existence, like the teacup ride at an amusement park, couldn’t be more ready for a pause; like the kind brought to us by a global pandemic. Even those who haven’t been affected by Parkinson’s can journey a little bit more closely to its center in this film. As the film drives its viewer through centrifugal oscillation, to a welcome stillness.