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The new documentary John Candy: I Like Me has an odd non-texture. It is not that it is slow or insignificant; it moves through events that one might expect to find in the biography of a movie star. But there is a haze, a blankness, in the documentary that seems to stem, purposely or not, from the death of Candy’s father at 35, on John’s fifth birthday. His family held his party anyway, and John was confused as to how he should behave. Photos show him as a little boy lost.
Candy’s grown son, Chris, says in the documentary, “There’s something that can happen to a child who goes through loss at that early of an age. They don’t know what to do with that trauma.”
This seems to apply to the documentary as well. The death is covered in the first 10 minutes, but director Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks’ son, makes the decision to move on in the simplest way—chronologically. There is much to tell about Candy’s professional life in particular before we come back, 90 minutes later, to the rest of what his family and friends said (no doubt immediately in the same interviews) about childhood loss. Whether Hanks did this due to a somewhat wooden choice of presentation, or whether he mimics in his form what Candy tried to do in life, is unclear. But it creates an odd floating feeling, a wondering at what else there might be to say, for much of the documentary.
Bill Murray says, “I can’t tell you what was right about John Candy or what was wrong. But he was my friend.”
Catherine O’Hara says, “I spent nearly every working hour, hundreds of evenings and weekends with John for nearly ten years. So where are the details of those days? I realize when I think of John, it’s not in terms of details. I think of John in terms of the big picture.”
The big picture is, by turn, that Candy was avuncular (Uncle Buck, one of his big hits, was Candy in many ways, someone says), an everyman, and that he served as a kind, goofy, North American dad (he was Canadian but raised his family in Los Angeles) in a way that was at least partially compensatory.
Candy’s friends and family appear, one by one, to testify to his overall good nature, sweetness, and easy laughter. Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Dan Ackroyd, Macaulay Culkin, Tom Hanks, the comedians from SCTV—Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara, et al—as well as Candy’s grown son and daughter, his widow, his sister, his childhood friends, all stress what a good father he was, how generous he was with others, and how he was a gentle giant.
Often, though, something pulls at these claims. Mel Brooks says Candy was a total actor because he was “a total person,” but in what ways is that right? Interviewees say Candy’s sense of humor made hard things bearable, but they add there were no therapists for average people in his part of Canada when he was younger and tie the unhealed wound of his childhood to his tendency not to care for himself most of his shortened life. He expected to die about the same age that his father had and seemed to work to fulfill that fate by overeating, smoking, and drinking. (The documentary ignores his drug use.)
His widow, Rose, says John was a kid his whole life, which sounds fun for others, but that “John took over being the dad” when his father died. Conan O’Brien says he saw Candy give to everybody and that “he felt good casting that glow.” But “the hazard of this business…if you’re a people pleaser [is] they’ll take whatever you’ve got, and they’ll ask for more, and there’s no end to it. It’s a bottomless cup of coffee.” Kids do not have to take care of everyone.
Candy may have laughed good-naturedly when treated cruelly by TV hosts, for his weight and professional choices, but he visibly tears up in those interviews. Catherine O’Hara says Candy and director John Hughes “shared a beautiful, dark sense of humor,” but we were not really shown “dark humor” before then.
Later in his career, Candy’s wife says, he told her, “There’s no work.” But, she says, “[T]here were movies on the table for him.” Candy thought people would not like him and that he might never work again. “John, in his insecurity, was coming through all the time,” she says.
“The thing that was so big and such a big secret was that he didn’t believe in himself,” his son says. “How fucking human is that?”
It is also human that these insecurities and crippling anxieties, coupled to a drive to succeed, led him to branch off into business and movie ventures that made him more unhappy, took him from the children he adored, and watered down his legacy. Part of the sadness of the second half of the documentary is a feeling that his talent was often wasted after, say, 1989’s Uncle Buck. Candy was in 44 movies; how many can even a fan name?
Perhaps the high point of his career was his role in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). One of his lines from the film gives the documentary its title. In Planes, Steve Martin’s character finally snaps and rants in irritation at Candy’s character. The scene goes on and on, painfully, cruelly, which gives Candy the chance to react tearfully and reply, “I like…I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. ‘Cause I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.”
After much insistence in the documentary that Candy always put large parts of himself into his characters, his wife and others tear up as they talk about this scene.
“People always talk about that moment,” Steve Martin says. “Twenty years later, they always talk about that moment.”
“He’s so tender in the movie,” Martin says. “[A]nd I always [felt] bad, you know. I [would] say, ‘Well, we are just pretending, you know.’ But he acted so hurt.”
In Planes, Candy’s wife is actually dead, of course, and he is forced to admit to Steve Martin at the end of the film: “I don’t have a home.” (Steve Martin, who in life also has thing about home, reacted in a recent documentary about his own life to the large emotion of playing opposite John Candy in that scene.)
This might be the basis for Candy’s best work—in Planes; in Uncle Buck, a goof who has to become a father figure; even in Stripes, where his character, Ox, hopes the army will offer him self-discipline, strength, and a sense of belonging.
“You know, there’s some things that are just painful,” Steve Martin says. “That’s it. And you can’t make ‘em not painful. There’s no closure for certain things.”
The end of the story comes in 1994, in Durango, Mexico, where Candy struggled to make the film Wagons East. He was apart from his family, under much stress, and unhappy with how things were going. He died of a heart attack in the middle of a night.
“I think it was 2:30 in the morning,” actor Don Lake says. “He was all alone in that big cowboy house. And then, when I heard how they found him, and it looked like he had sat up on the side of the bed and opened up the Bible…and was reading from it…and just passed away on the bed. But I remember thinking”—Lake breaks down—“how he was trying to find home.”
John Candy was 43.
