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Long before John Candy became a household name outside of Canada, the comedian would occasionally adopt a persona that his friends and colleagues dubbed “Johnny Toronto.” Unlike the often shy, overly genial guy who used to disappear into the background of Second City ensemble scenes, Johnny was brash, bold, a guy who had the city in his back pocket. You want a reservation at the hottest joint in town? Johnny Toronto has got you covered. Who just bought a round of drinks for the whole bar? Johnny Toronto is the guy picking up the tab. Hey, where did all those pretty ladies go? They just got into Johnny Toronto’s limo and are heading out to the club.
It was another character that Candy created, a fictional mover and shaker that he could trot out as easily as the showbiz suck-up William B. Williams, the egomaniacal Johnny LaRue, or the polka-music legend Yosh Schmenge. This one just happened to exist in the real world as opposed to the small screen. He shared the actor’s generosity of spirit and love of a good time. Unlike Candy, Johnny Toronto was confident, cool, unflappable — the alpha alter ego, often used to hide insecurities about his size, his insecurities, the hole carved into his giant heart from a central trauma that he never got over. The cruel world could crush Candy. Nothing could harm Johnny Toronto.
Fake surname or not, there may not have been a more appropriate movie to kick off the 50th Toronto International Film Festival than John Candy: I Like Me, an extremely loving tribute to a Canadian icon who was, by all accounts, the easiest guy in the world to love. Produced by superfan Ryan Reynolds and directed by Colin Hanks, this documentary isn’t full of jaw-dropping revelations and dug-up dirt; it opens, in fact, with Candy’s fellow Second City partner Bill Murray complaining that no one, including himself, will have a bad thing to say about the guy. (To his credit, Murray eventually remembers one anecdote about Candy “milking” his lines during a staged reading of a play directed by Sydney Pollock.) There isn’t a dark side that gets dragged into the light, though you’ll hear about Candy experiencing dark nights of the soul. This is the polar opposite of, say, a project designed to be controversial, confrontational and put TIFF on the defensive. It’s a valentine to someone who, 31 years after his death at age 43, remains one of the Great White North’s favorite sons. And it will break your heart.
Candy didn’t wear that particular internal organ on his sleeve so much as model whole outfits made out of it, and the sheer abundance of his authentic niceness is I Like Me‘s prime running motif. As Murray rightfully predicts, no one has a bad thing to say about John, though you’ll hear a lot of concern expressed over how his sensitivity meant he bruised easily, and the way that his people-pleasing tendencies left him drained and exhausted. The early trauma of his dad dying from a heart attack in his thirties, which happened when John was just five years old, left a void in Candy that he spent decades trying to fill with food and drink. And applause, naturally — he was a performer, after all — though you won’t hear stories about adulation addiction here. This film is here to praise him and, regrettably, bury him, just not in a metaphorical sense. That Hanks shows you Candy’s funeral in 1994 and plays longtime friend Dan Aykroyd‘s eulogy over scenes of John horsing around with his kids, goofing around on set, etc., right up front, makes this perfectly clear. But it’s meant to celebrate the man first and foremost. I Like Me loves John. So does everyone who speaks on the record here, from Steve Martin to Tom Hanks to his SCTV costars to his family members. So do you.
The movie traces his early years, when a busted knee forced him to refocus his energy toward the stage. Friends essentially trick him into auditioning for the newly opened Second City in Toronto, and he gets in by virtue of a scene where he lets his scene partner yammer on while he simply listens and nods. His work with the improv group and his friendship with the cast of the legendary 1972 production of Godspell (which gets its own loving documentary at the fest this year as well) leads him to becoming part of SCTV, a sketch series that starts as a riposte to SNL and ends up surpassing it in terms of quality, if not longevity. If nothing else, Hanks’ doc serves as a reminder of how brilliant that show was, and how mind-bogglingly brilliant Candy was on it. Conan O’Brien, who once spent a day with Candy after inviting him to visit Harvard to receive an honorary award, tells the story of seeing a skit entitled “Yellowbelly,” in which Candy played the biggest coward in the wild west. It ends with him shooting a mother and child (!) in the back. O’Brien calls it his “Oppenheimer moment” in terms of humor. You can 100-percent see why.
Candy would eventually begin booking movie roles as Hollywood players became fans of his SCTV work. Many of us comedy nerds of a certain age discovered Candy when he showed up in the Bill Murray comedy Stripes as the platoon’s resident heavyset, extra-sincere doofus, only to become die-hard fanatics when SCTV began airing after SNL in the early 1980s. Then came Splash, in which Candy simultaneously supports Tom Hanks like a seasoned pro and steals the movie, and more than one of the doc’s talking heads points out that his hedonistic, smooth-talking character is a dead ringer for Johnny Toronto. That alter-ego once saved Candy from feeling like he wanted to disappear. Now it turned him into a genuine movie star.
With that came more responsibilities, more hands to shake, more interviews in which people discuss his weight and Candy smiles through his self-consciousness, more time away from his wife Rosemary, his daughter Jennifer and his son Christopher (all of whom are interviewed in the film and offer invaluable insights on John). When the lifelong football fan buys a stake in the Toronto Argonauts, who go on to win the Canadian Football League’s version of the Super Bowl, there’s even more travel and responsibilities. It all takes a toll. Not even Johnny Toronto can save him. Hindsight adds a level of tragedy to even the most innocuous exchanges about him worrying over his brother’s health, his dad’s premature passing, how he hopes his son never has to deal with the pain of losing a parent early. Still, when Hanks eventually brings the odometer-like timeline he keeps trotting out to rewind key moments back to 1994 and that funeral from the doc’s opening, you can’t help but tear up.
What never left John, of course, was the vulnerability. It informed everything he did, whether it was parodying the idea of men with Teflon exteriors or the way he could suddenly reveal a world of hurt in his blustery nincompoops, socially awkward blowhards, and party animals run amuck. There’s a reason that everyone in the film mentions Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as their favorite Candy movie. I Like Me takes its title from the speech he gives after Steve Martin’s uptight fellow traveler lays into him. Watch it again, if you haven’t in a while. It’s still a killer.
Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes. John Candy: I Like Me — which hits Amazon Prime in October — plays the greatest hits and checks off a number of standard there-goeth-the-great-man documentary boxes. But it also reminds you how of funny Candy was as a comedian was, how poignant he was as an actor, and how earned his reputation was a genuinely nice guy. It may make you immediately return to a number of his best sketches and blockbuster hits, and remember exactly why he’s so beloved, and so very missed.
