‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: A Star’s Dignity

This is probably less a critique than a thank-you note to director Davis Guggenheim and to the subject of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a marriage of exhilaration and sadness and, despite the title, the most moving thing on television. Mr. Fox was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars when he was diagnosed in 1991 with Parkinson’s disease, which finally forced his full retirement in 2021. His sense of humour remains a wonder. Something most viewers will only have to wonder, fortunately, is whether they would maintain the same dignity under the same set of circumstances.

The title, “Still,” describes something the actor never seemed to be, as evidenced by the voluminous collection of film clips Mr. Guggenheim uses to structure much of the film—Mr. Fox was always running, from “Teen Wolf,” to “The Secret of My Success,” to “Bright Lights, Big City,” to the blockbuster “Back to the Future” franchise and in and out of “Family Ties,” the sitcom that established his comedy credentials and wide appeal. Much of the background action, as well as Mr. Fox’s early biography, is covered through dramatic re-creations and otherwise unconnected film scenes knitted into a coherent narrative. The research must have been strenuous; the editing, too. The pace is nonstop, the humour abundant, the devotion of Mr. Fox’s wife, actress Tracy Pollan, is made plain, and there’s no small amount of nostalgia in store for people who know and love the Fox filmography. But the heart and soul of the film are the face-to-face interviews, which are far less delicate than one might expect. And all the deeper for it.

Seven interviews were conducted over the span of a year, and at one point Mr. Fox and his director (an Oscar winner for “An Inconvenient Truth”) are getting back together after some time, the subject recounting how he basically had, in the interim, fallen and broken his face. Mr. Guggenheim reacts with alarm; his subject is almost blasé. “Gravity is real,” he says, laughing. “Even if you’re only falling from my height.” During a walk along Fifth Avenue with an aide, Mr. Fox is recognised by a fan and when he turns to say hello back, he topples to the sidewalk. “You knocked me off my feet,” he tells the passerby. Everyone smiles, but it breaks your heart.

“I can see in your eyes that you’ve got a great one-liner,” Mr. Guggenheim says to the actor at a point in their exchanges, “and then it has a problem getting to your mouth.” Mr. Fox doesn’t disagree; he doesn’t have to, and often lets a nonresponse compensate when a response would be thwarted by his ailment. As Mr. Guggenheim says, the predictable storyline in a Michael J. Fox movie now would be about a huge star getting a debilitating disease and being crushed by it. “Yeah,” Mr. Fox says, “that’s boring.” Nothing in “Still” is the least bit boring.

Nor is it preachy, or weepy, or looking for pity for its subject, who isn’t looking for any either. He does recall feeling at some point, post-diagnosis, that he was somehow reaping cosmic payback for the enormous if less-than-overnight success he had enjoyed after several seemingly immovable objections fell and he was cast in “Family Ties.” (His tales of Hollywood poverty are close to harrowing although, as he might say, he got over it.) If there’s a flaw in “Still,” it might be Mr. Fox’s reluctance to discuss his physical agony or the psychic struggle that comes with Parkinson’s. (“The worst thing is to be confined,” he says, answering one of Mr. Guggenheim’s very direct questions. “To have no way out.”) You come close, Mr. Guggenheim says about Mr. Fox discussing his pain, “and then you dart away.” But that is a principal reason his subject, and film, are so involving and watchable and rich.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: A Star’s Dignity

Weaving together film clips, dramatic re-creations and interviews with the actor, this affecting documentary on Apple TV+ explores his life with Parkinson’s disease.