Michael J. Fox Is Due To Receive An Honorary Oscar In 2023: Here’s Why He Deserves It For His Acting, Not Just His Activism

Michael J. Fox is huge in my memory. As Alex P. Keaton on television’s Family Ties, he was the lone neocon offspring of a pair of dyed-in-the-wool hippies, an unapologetic capitalist at the height of Reagan’s “Me Generation” who spoke to the worst trends of a period during which America’s self-esteem was being reconstituted in the neon-fantasia of a former B-actor turned President. Alex represented the death of idealism in pursuit of material gratification; the elevation of the business degree as the highest ambition of higher education. I think it was a surprise for everyone, though maybe it shouldn’t have been, that a character designed to create tension in a situation comedy became the breakout star of it. A lot had to do with the spirit of the age; as much had to do with the young Canadian star asked to play him. Michael J. Fox was a throwback, a David Cassidy look and a squeaky voice married to obvious intelligence and just enough self-effacement. 

Three years into an eight-year run, Fox made the jump to the big screen in two films: Teen Wolf which didn’t have a lot of big expectations attached to it but over-performed big-time ($30m on a $1m budget); and Back to the Future which, after Robert Zemeckis decided the chunk of movie he’d already shot starring Eric Stoltz was over-serious and deadly, made the hard decision to fire his lead actor and reshoot it with a comic actor. It became the top-grossing film of 1985 ($211m on a $19m budget), the first of one of the most anticipated trilogies of the blockbuster period. Overnight, it seemed, Fox crossed over from TV star into a viable movie star so long as he kept to a narrow lane, shooting his second-rated television show during the day (in 1985 and ‘86, Family Ties was second only to The Cosby Show) and making a little Hollywood history at night. An over-achieving workaholic as Alex P. Keaton, the popular storyline about him typecast him as the same in the collective imagination.

For a ten-year chunk from 1985-1996, Fox appeared in a series of films of varying quality — never hitting the heights of Back to the Future again financially — its sequels each making less than the last, while creatively into the nineties, one could argue whatever alchemy Fox captured in the ’80s was vulnerable to evolving expectations and Fox’s own absence from television (where he was accepted without effort and which would welcome him back with Spin City in 1996) and his own admirable discretion in choosing challenging film projects. I don’t think Fox was ever really taken seriously as an actor during his star period, something to do with the stigma attached to being a television wunderkind before television became prestigious, something more to do with how the best comic actors — like Cary Grant, for instance — are taken for granted in their time. But the things he did very well are difficult to quantify, impossible to replicate. It’s worth noting, too, how a few of the choices he made when he could’ve done anything, are remarkable in the rearview. 

Take the first film he did after Back to the Future shot him into the stratosphere: Paul Schrader’s peculiar rags-to-rags band melodrama Light of Day co-starring Joan Jett as “Patti,” Fox’ character’s rocker sister, and Gena Rowlands as their disapproving, holy roller mother, perpetually dressed in a grimace and wedding cake-pink dress. Schrader did this film as his followup to Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Fox making the decision to go here instead of cashing in his golden ticket speaks to Fox not needing the money sure, but more than that, I think, to a genuine interest in making things that didn’t suck with artists who mattered. Here, Fox plays Joe Resnick, is the “good” sibling, the one who cares a lot about his little nephew, does the dishes with his mom, and if he plays rhythm guitar in his sister’s band now and then, it’s just him trying to keep everything together. Did I mention Jason Miller plays his distant father who’s in denial of his wife’s progressive dementia? For me, watching this again on opening night as a fourteen-year-old looking for something to tide me over until Back to the Future II dropped was a shock. The bad kind. 

There’s domestic violence, Fox swearing a lot and getting hit with a guitar stand by Joan Jett, poverty, addiction, shoplifting, quiet and not-so-quiet desperation, a best friend played by Michael McKean when he was still in the popular memory as Lenny from Laverne & Shirley, it was… it was a lot. Schrader’s vision of the world is bleak and seeing Alex P. Keaton playing a character suffering the consequences of policies that his Family Ties character would install for the next forty years was jarring and unpleasant. Watching Light of Day in 2022 and it’s what you would expect from Paul Schrader attempting John Cassavetes, but it’s a fascinating time capsule, a principled social document, all of it tied together by Fox as an effortless empathy generator. A title song performed by Jett and written by Bruce Springsteen doesn’t hurt the medicine going down, either, a blue collar elegy used in the film as an indication that the ties that bind are if not strong, at least strong enough. I think of a scene in a hospital when Joe’s mom has just gotten a bad diagnosis. Fox plays against Rowlands and Miller and holds his own. I guess I’m less surprised that he does than I am amazed at the kind of chutzpah required to even try. 

His next film is with Herbert Ross, who had a big movie in 1984 with Footloose, but I remember him as the director of one of my favorite Dennis Potter adaptations, Pennies from Heaven. Another serious artist, in other words, even if The Secret of My Success is an engineered Fox vehicle penned by the team behind Top Gun. In it, Fox is an Alex P. Keaton type, freshly graduated from Kansas State University (indeed, he’s introduced mucking out a stable on his parents’ farm) who infiltrates his corrupt uncle’s corporation by starting in the mailroom but occupying an empty office and taking on a fictional identity as a white-collar shark. There were a lot of movies like this in the ’80s: Big the most successful of them, in which an imposter proves better at pulling the levers of big business than the CEOs taking up space. No accident that this premise (look at television’s Remington Steele as another example) shared so many similarities to the anti-wealthy comedies of the Great Depression. The deeper one digs in the films of the ’80s, the more one finds the resistance. Fox’s Brantley Foster is a fast-talking, unctuous, try hard, hustling himself into the corner office. He was an avatar for the great American dream of making your fortune in a system designed to suck the blood of your labor. Watch for Mercedes Ruehl in a bit part as a waitress, just on the verge of semi-stardom. Really, The Secret of My Success feels like a more populist than not dry run for his turn in James Bridges’ adaptation of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City the following year. 

Bridges’ last film as director, Bright Lights, Big City is shot by Gordon Willis with a script by McInerney and is instantly compelling because Fox’s Jamie Conway is introduced in a nightclub where he can’t for the life of him hear what the bartender is saying to him. True to the novel, much of the film is told as an internal monologue, and I remember distinctly how this film garnered comparisons to the previous year’s Less Than Zero with its hot casts and rampant drug use. Another film decidedly against type, Fox is exceptional in it, committed and twitchy with a view of Manhattan decidedly less romanticized than the one in The Secret to My Success. I think it’s interesting how many of Fox’s films have him waking up to an alarm or a phone ringing in his underwear. He’s very good at being woken and numerous pictures took advantage of that. More than just a curiosity, I would offer it as analysis of the kind of actor Fox was: capable of a range of small expressions to carry him from zero to sentient without a word of dialogue. I love Bright Lights, Big City as a portrait, sometimes stunning, of being out of control and spiraling into despair and humiliation. A scene where he tries to talk to his ex-wife, a model named Amanda (Phoebe Cates), as she’s walking the runway of a fashion show shows Fox using his high-strung nervousness to unexpected, and powerful, effect. When he finally hits bottom, he gets on the phone with the one nice girl he knows played by his real-life wife Tracy Pollan. He tells her his mother died a year ago and for the first time processes the grief he’s been hiding under all that cocaine and self-loathing. I thought he might be nominated for an Oscar for this in the year Dustin Hoffman won for Rain Man, but I was sure he would be for his next turn in Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War (1989). 

I was sure about a lot of things about Casualties of War. I was sure it would be recognized as a classic, instantly, in a year Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July sucked up all the Vietnam War movie oxygen. It got nominated for almost no awards and barely made back half of its $23MM budget. But I loved it so much. It spoke to human darkness. It’s by no means an easy film to watch, much less rewatch, but Fox is a revelation in it. He plays a young soldier in a platoon led by a psychotic Sean Penn whose character, Meserve, hatches a plan to kidnap a Vietnamese woman for the purposes of serial rape and then murder. Fox’s Eriksson doesn’t participate, but doesn’t stop his peers, either, afraid for his own life perhaps and maybe too stunned by the evil of this act to understand it’s happening until it’s happened. Of course it’s based on a true story. I don’t know a lot of people who’ve watched Casualties of War, but everyone who does is changed by it. I think that it’s been memory-holed because it’s a vicious, uncompromising film about who we are as human beings and Americans, who we are as men, starring one of the most likable stars of the 1980s. In it, Eriksson loses his composure after it’s too late and all of Fox’s potential for violence explodes across the screen. He is, in that moment, more than a television star uneasily slotted into movie stardom: he is a movie star (and one of the great ones). Into the ’90s, there are marginal moments like Doc Hollywood, and good ones like Mars Attacks! and Peter Jackson’s tremendous The Frighteners (it’s Fox’s Tarantino-career-genre-rescue moment), but far too many middling to poor ones like Greedy and Life with Mikey. He found out he had Parkinson’s Disease in 1991 and to be fair, he had bigger fish to fry.

Hearing news Fox was going to receive an honorary Oscar at the 2023 Academy Awards, I suspected it was largely for his work as an ambassador for his disease and the author of a couple well-received autobiography/memoirs in which he is honest about his struggles, but I wanted to throw my hat in the ring for Fox as a performer who actually deserves this recognition for the film work he did. Casualties of War is the obvious one, but Bright Lights, Big City deserves consideration — Light of Day, too, as it happens. I would also offer that Back to the Future is a masterpiece only because Michael J. Fox is so good in it; his Marty McFly is credibly shocked by the revelation his dad is a pervert and his mom is sexually liberated; always-affecting when he tries, and fails, to warn his best friend how in the future he will be gunned down in a parking lot for stealing nuclear material from Libyan terrorists. What he does in it is not easy to do; it is hard enough that I can’t think of any other actor in the 1980s who could have done it better and, with the Brat Pack in full flower in 1985, there was no shortage of actors of Fox’s age who would’ve loved to have gotten the chance. He is an action star who single-handedly made skateboarding cool for me and my friends in suburban Denver; a romantic lead; a physical comedian gifted with impeccable timing; and most elusive of all, an actor who felt like a real person at all times, no matter the situation he found himself in. He’s Tom Hanks who made dangerous choices. He made everything he was in better. He’s the real deal.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.