Different Slants

Doc Hollywood (1991) starring Michael J. Fox who was born in Western Canada in 1961, who is now 47 years old and sadly very ill with Parkinson’s disease, which terminated his career in the movies, is one of my favorite, romanticized views of small town life and the discovery of love when you weren’t looking for it. 

Fox is a skilled, overworked, underpaid, wise-ass, self-centered and tense emergency room doctor in a public hospital in New York City, repairing gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and other grim urban disasters who is totally unpopular with his fellow workers.   When he receives an inventation to join a very upscale plastic surgery practice in LA, he finds that no one wants to come to his farewell party, and he leaves his years long job without making a ripple.

That is our first impression of Fox, a subtle, sensitive, funny and very ingaging actor, whom audiences don’t so much like him as they want to adopt him.  Slight in stature at about 4’10”, he projects confidence, and irony and a willingness to endure what he cannot change, in this complicated story.

Eagarly leaving NYC behind on the Interstate going west, he encounters a road block far from any major urban areas and had to make a detour which takes him deeper into rural fantasyland in South Carolina.  He is driving his beloved snow white sports car, his prized possesion, and after suddenly missing a turn and becoming confused, plows into the white picket fence of the Mayor’s house.

Sentenced to community service, until his smashed up but rescuable car is repaired, by that Mayor, whom I believe is also the judge in a typical small town movie role where one character has multiple and unrelated jobs, just like in Baby Boom, (last week’s column) where the guy who comes to fix Diane Keaton’s dry well (or was it the roof?  Or both?  It doesn’t matter…)  is also the featured singer at the town dance.

After meeting a range of amusing townspeople, some who like him and some who scorn him as too stuck up for their little town, he is assigned to work with the very old but (naturally) beloved cranky Town Doc, who measures his wealth in babies born long ago who now are having their own babies, instead of material wealth.  His nickname, Doc Hollywood, is not attached to him with admiration.

There is a plan afoot, hatched by the devious Mayor and other co-conspirators, to somehow lure the dashing (to them) big city doctor to stay in their beautiful homey little town.  They even offer him a house, for free.  Not as chance, responds Fox, who yearns for the big bucks he will pile up reshaping floppy breasts, double chins and sagging rear ends.

                                                                                                     (Read on …)