Looking Back: Michael J. Fox in 'Back to the Future'

Back to the Future is one of those films which I recommend to just about everybody, regardless of their tastes, or even whether or not they enjoy films in general. It's crowd-pleasing cinema at its finest; each aspect of it just seems to tick all the boxes, and it pretty much is just blockbuster at it finest. It's technically speaking a sci-fi teen comedy but I think to categorize it as such can't begin to cover what a universal impact it has had as a film worldwide. There's so many great things about it I need more than just one blog post to cover; but among them there's the fantastic direction by Robert Zemeckis which captures two distinct time periods with great panache, and blends a great deal of science fiction parody and homage into it as well; a great screenplay which turns potentially uncomfortable topic matters into hilarious fodder; great special effects; and a fantastic ensemble with among many great players, a lovably zany and brilliant Christopher Lloyd, an eccentric Crispin Glover, a wonderfully sweet Lea Thompson, and the brute of all brutes Thomas F. Wilson. 

On today, Michael J. Fox's birthday, I thought I'd take a look back at this film's leading man and one of the most underrated leading man achievements in 1980's cinema, and indeed of all-time.

Easily one of the more underrated actors in recent film history, I like to think of Fox as sort of the Simon Pegg of his time: a terrific comical talent who unfortunately was/still is viewed as being only good at being lighthearted, breezy and funny. Firstly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that being an actor's strengths as people too often underestimate how hard it is to play a 'funny' character, and how easily wrong it can go. Secondly, Fox, like Pegg, is so much more than just a 'comedian'. He's got some darn good dramatic depths he can plumb whenever he wants to.

I'm meandering here a bit but Fox is also an extremely competent straight dramatic actor when he wants to be, as can be seen in Casualties of War, an incredibly haunting war film by Brian de Palma. Fox has several incredible hurdles to face in his performance here as Private Eriksson, as not only is it an extremely reactive performance, he also has to contend with a dreadful performance by Sean Penn as his ridiculously hammy Sergeant. Fox though is superb throughout the film as a moral voice to his platoon urging them not to become the monsters an act of rape and violence could turn them into, underplays his emotions beautifully and turns in a great performance.

Anyway I'm going on a tangent here. Back to Marty McFly. No one could play McFly but Fox. I repeat, nobody. Even the extremely talented Eric Stoltz, who took Fox's place when he was unavailable in the first place, was rather ill-fitting for the light humorous touch and comic timing, and very unique sort of boyish charm McFly has that fit Fox's talents perfectly. Marty is a challenging role, make no doubt about that, so I can imagine how desperate Zemeckis and Universal Studios were to gain the services of Fox in the role because what he does in it is simply great.

Marty McFly is not a role which requires the actor to bare his soul or go for emotional dramatics, but I refuse to call it uncomplex because it's far from that. I mean look at everything Marty has to go through, in the course of one film: going back and forth in time, deals with a dysfunctional family in the present and having to court his parents together back in the past, strive for greater dreams for both himself and his girlfriend (I forgot to mention, Claudia Wells is very good as Marty's girlfriend here and it's such a shame she didn't manage to reprise her role for the sequels, though her reasons for doing so were very admirable and her replacement Elizabeth Shue was also quite good), and most importantly his relationship with Doc Brown (Lloyd) is a very complex relationship emotionally due to the whole time travel conundrum.

Well suffice to say that Fox absolutely nails each and every one of these complex little arcs for the character of Marty McFly. It could've been easy to make Marty too lightweight/lighthearted, too obnoxious in his cockiness, too overtly funny or trying to steal scenes from his more overt co-stars, but he does none of these things. What Fox does it blend his performance perfectly in each scene to what the schematics of the film demands. When it necessitates he interact with his co-stars he shares great chemistry/anti-chemstry with each of them, depending on the requirements of the scene:

And when he gets a chance to show off by himself, he does so with aplomb:

Fox's performance as Marty McFly is really not just comic acting at its finest, but rather among the finest leading man performances of all-time in terms of charisma, humour, likablity. Fox makes himself one of the most iconic things about the Back to the Future films (even the good and enjoyable sequels, where he's always solid). He can switch from uprarious to poignant in a second's notice, and I have to say this is the benchmark by which I judge many a blockbuster performance.