With the Toronto International Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition this year, it makes sense that one Canadian institution would honor another with its opening-night film. And with TIFF known for being an audience-facing festival whose top award is voted on by paying customers rather than a jury, it made additional sense that the film would be about John Candy, the Canadian actor and comic who was nothing if not a people-pleaser of the first magnitude.
“John Candy: I Like Me,” which opened the 50th TIFF with screenings on Thursday night in the Princess of Wales Theatre and Roy Thomson Hall, is a celebratory film that acknowledges the anxiety and frustrations that sometimes beset the star of SCTV and films like “Splash,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “Uncle Buck,” but isn’t terribly interested in digging for a dark side of the man that virtually everyone describes as being down-to-earth, generous and gentle.
“I wish I had some more bad things to say about him,” says Bill Murray in an interview that opens the film from actor-turned-director Colin Hanks. “That’s the problem when you talk about John.” He nods toward the off-camera interviewer, presumably Hanks. “I hope this thing you’re doing turns up people who have some dirt on him.”
Of course, the movie doesn’t turn up any of that dirt – and it’s unlikely that it would appeal to Hanks, who first met Candy when was six or seven and his father, Tom, was starring with Candy in “Splash.” “John Candy: I Like Me,” named after a line from a speech Candy gives after Steve Martin’s character lays into him in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” could well be titled “John Candy: We Like Him” – and rather than seeming like a cop-out, that seems like an entirely appropriate approach to the beloved actor and Canadian icon.
The film dares ask the question, “How many nice things can we say about one person before you get tired of hearing them?” and finds that the answer is, “Probably more than you can fit into this movie.”
That’s not because Candy is perfect by any means, but he’s so innately likeable that you root for him. The TIFF audience certain did: When Dan Aykroyd called Candy “the sweetest, most generous person every known to me” in a voiceover early in the film, the crowd burst into applause.
And by opening with Candy’s funeral and then marking new chapters by having on-screen dates count backwards from 1994, the year he died, the film keeps its eyes on the central fact that haunted his life: His father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 35, on his son’s fifth birthday, making Candy always aware that his own days might be numbered. (He outlived his dad by eight years, dying at the age of 43.)
This is Hanks’ third documentary after a pair of music-related docs, 2015’s “All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records” and 2017’s “Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends),” about the band that was onstage in Paris’ Bataclan theater when terrorists killed about 90 fans.
Mortality hangs over “John Candy: I Like Me,” but in a far different way. In his family, the premature death of his father was rarely talked about, but the silence didn’t help the young Candy come to terms with the uncomfortable connection between his birthday and his father’s passing. But once he blew out his knee playing football, the shy kid somehow gravitated toward performing – where despite his insecurities he was brilliant, according to colleagues like Aykroyd, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas, all of whom were interviewed for the film.
Onstage, Thomas said, “He looked like a star, he acted like a star,” while offstage, he cut quite the figure as well: Murray paints a vivid picture of his friend’s apartment, complete with a Barcalounger, lime green shag carpeting and golden drapes.
But the film really comes to life with old clips, including the priceless “Yellowbelly” sketch, in which Candy played the most cowardly cowboy in the old West, shooting a mother and child in the back because he felt threatened. (Trust me, it plays a lot funnier than it reads.)
Hollywood came calling in the person of Steven Spielberg, who cast Candy in his flop World War II comedy “1941,” but bigger roles in better films followed. When John Belushi, another rotund comic and actor who’d emerged from sketch comedy, died of a drug overdose in 1982, Thomas said a weeping Candy said to him, “Oh god, it’s starting.” And when Tom Hanks met him a year later for “Splash,” he said he got the feeling that Candy, then 33, was obsessed with only being two years shy of the age at which his father had died.
But the 1980s turned out to be a good decade for Candy; despite the constant indignities of being treated differently because of his weight, he had hits and developed a reputation for how well he treated fans and friends. (Conan O’Brien tells a lovely story about inviting Candy to Harvard to receive a comedy award and talk to the students, and how generous he was with his time.)
There’s a lengthy section of similar stories and similar testimonials about two-thirds of the way through the 113-minute film, which plays as if it’s a summation of sorts – but instead of ending the film, the sequence is simply a false ending that leads into a third act that has moments of glory, including the nine movies he made with John Hughes, followed by the increasing anxiety and doubt that kept into Candy’s life in the 1990s.
This doesn’t make for a dark movie – the copious clips of Candy’s performances always keep things light and entertaining – but it does bring additional shadows into the story, which helps flesh out an affectionate, good-hearted portrait. “John Candy: I Like Me,” made with the cooperation of Candy’s children and his wife, feels like a tale told by friends, but friends who are less interested in promoting idolatry than in showing you why they loved the man.
Catherine O’Hara gets one of the best final lines when she talks about a dream she had after Candy’s death. The two were talking, she said, when she blurted it out: “Why’s you have to die?”
John, she said, looked at her and shot back, “Why’d you have to bring it up?”