At the start of Colin Hanks’ sweet and deeply moving documentary John Candy: I Like Me, Bill Murray jokingly tells the off-screen director that he hopes he’ll be able to find someone to say something really bad about him. Candy was so beloved by his peers and family that, for Murray and many of his longtime friends, his purity became almost an in-joke.
The Canadian comic superstar died in his sleep, suddenly, at the age of 43, and Hanks frames his funeral as an anchor point. Flashing back in time repeatedly and using a mix of traditional talking head interviews, archival footage, talk show appearances, and rarely seen outtakes, I Like Me is an attempt at casting Candy in the one role he never got to play during his lifetime: himself.
John Candy is Beautifully Human In This Tapestry-Like Documentary
If subject-driven documentaries like these are hagiographic by design, I Like Me avoids the trap without indulging in Murray’s ironic directive. Instead, Candy is made human by his humanness, flawed in the way most people are flawed, exceptional in the ways most people are not. Candy is portrayed as a loving and attentive father to his children Chris and Jennifer, a devoted artist to a craft he pᴀssionately protected, and as a genuinely kind soul whose heart was too embattled by the warfare of Hollywood’s bleakest expectations of celebrity.
“He was a grand man,” Dan Aykroyd says of his best friend in a stunning eulogy given at Candy’s funeral, and Hanks leans into that suggestion. Large in stature and in influence, Candy’s size was both his legacy and his Achilles heel. He was the son of a man whose heart failed at the devastatingly young age of 35 when John was merely five, and the physical danger of hereditary genetics is matched by a persistent plague of anxiety at a time when therapy was still very much taboo. “His mind was overweight,” suggests Chris.
Even more devastatingly, Candy’s wife, Rosemary, relays that her husband’s early efforts to lose weight were met with resistance by his representation in Hollywood. The industry wanted him the way he was, and, like Chris Farley, Candy found himself frequently the ʙuтт of low-level buffoonery that came at the expense of his long-term mental health.
But I Like Me is also a gorgeous celebratory tapestry of the artist, whose legendary appearances in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Splash, and years on SCTV were standouts in a sea of standouts. Candy came up in the same Toronto comedy scene as Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, and Gilda Radnor. A staple of the Second City scene in the North, Candy grew a reputation as a blisteringly funny sketch comedian whose groundedness was distinctly uncommon for comics.
Candy fashioned himself first and foremost as an actor, a penchant for verisimilitude that is particularly evident in Splash and in the sober speech he gives in Planes, Trains & Automobiles that supplies the documentary its тιтle. The former film cemented Candy as a certifiable star, but the latter’s moment, in which Candy’s character Del responds to a vicious takedown at the hands of Steve Martin’s Neal by saying simply, honestly, that “I like me,” was an inadvertently metatheatrical moment.
Candy’s repeated appearances on talk shows where he is sneered at for being overweight, even as he is being asked to stay that way, reveals a man who effectively put up armor.
Most effectively, Shane Reid and Darrin Roberts edit the film in such a way that suggests Candy’s outsized influence. Brief though his career was, Candy’s output was immense. Through the amazing array of talking heads Hanks ᴀssembles to share their relationship to Candy, we are left with the distinct impression that there just wasn’t anyone else like John. A grand man indeed, in a grand documentary to suit him.
