RUN TERRY RUN: 4 STARS. “provides an up close and personal look at Fox.”
Constructed from almost 100 hours of newly uncovered film, much of it shot during the Marathon of Hope or leftover from John Simpson’s 1981 CBC film “Terry Fox: I Had a Dream,” the new film transports us back to 1980. Like a newly opened time capsule it is locked in time, with no modern flourishes. Director Sean Menard forms a picture of Fox and his compassion and courage from the restored archival material, not from retrospective talking head interviews or the addition of newly shot footage.
It’s a trip backwards in time, one that provides an up close and personal look at Fox. From his exhaustion and humor to his stubbornness and humility, it’s as intimate a portrait as we’re ever likely to get.
The story of the plainspoken but philosophical twenty-two-year-old everyman whose Marathon of Hope mission, to run across Canada on one leg and raise a donation of $1 from every Canadian for cancer research, was cut short by cancer, is tragic, and the film, as it winds down to the conclusion of Fox’s run, is devastating.
Time has put Fox on a pedestal, celebrating him for the hero he was, but this film reminds us that he was also a twenty-two-year-old looking forward to a future which, sadly, he never got to experience.
It’s sad, but it is also a story of a country coming together to support one remarkable, determined young man. In our age of fracture and cynicism, it’s refreshing and necessary to have a movie like “Run Terry Run” provide an firsthand look at what Canadian unity and heroism look like.
“Right now, Canada is going through a real tough period politically,” says a young student in a 1981 archival clip, “and maybe just for a little while, Terry Fox sort of gave us one goal to work towards and one thing to work for as a nation, rather than as 10 provinces.”
Timely words, now and then.
Comments are closed.
