New bio-docs chronicling the lives of Michael J. Fox and Anna Nicole Smith highlight contrasting challenges, public perceptions and paths to fame with traditional chronological formats. LA Weekly reviews both.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Apple TV+)
For most of the ‘80s and a good chunk of the ‘90s, Michael J. Fox was a dominating presence in film and television. The Family Ties and Back to the Future star’s boyish charm, insouciant comic timing, and diminutive stature made him one of the most likable actors of the era. That’s one of many reasons why the actor’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease struck such a deep nerve.
In the Apple TV+ documentary, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) lets his protagonist tell his own story. By placing a camera in front of the Canadian-born actor and simply asking him questions, Guggenheim unspools a narrative that pulls the audience into Fox’s multilayered story with a pressing intimacy. In addition to the interview, the film interweaves family photos, television interviews, dramatic recreations, scenes from Fox’s movies, and footage of his daily life with wife Tracy Pollan and their children. It creates a heartfelt mosaic of a man who refuses to be pitied even when the odds are stacked against him.
Although this “everything but the kitchen sink” approach mostly works, the film occasionally falls off the tracks by using clips of Fox’s movies to illuminate key moments in his life. There’s a particular fondness for inserting scenes from 1987’s Bright Lights, Big City to dramatize some of the actor’s more challenging career moments. If you’re familiar with that film, which is an underappreciated snapshot of a cocaine-addled writer in Manhattan, these moments feel clunky at best. One wonders why Guggenheim didn’t simply use more personal photos or footage instead.
The movie works best when Guggenheim and editor Michael Harte rely on traditional tropes of…
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