A Grand Man

Of John Candy, and his fatness

Bill Murray opens the new John Candy documentary I Like Me with a monologue regretting the fact that he can’t think of anything bad to say about John Candy. “I hope that what you’re producing here turns up some people that have got some dirt on him,” Murray says deadpan, because so far as he’s aware, everyone remembers the guy as a total mensch. Oh wait, actually he can think of one thing. There was that one time they were doing a play, and… Here the monologue cuts off, but we return to the play story later, which turns out to be nothing more than a story of scene-hogging hamminess. (John mischievously decided to milk a scene far longer than necessary, at the expense of his long-suffering fellow actors.)

There’s no particular reason for this documentary to come out at this particular moment in time, although it might have initially been intended to premiere on the 30th anniversary of Candy’s death last year. As it is, it arrives a year late, with no other Candy-related round anniversary to which to attach itself. (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, his most beloved work, is an awkward 38 this year.) It’s a labor of love by Tom Hanks’s son, Colin, in collaboration with various professional colleagues who simply wanted to talk about their old friend.

Per Murray’s complaint, viewers looking for a sordid “rest of the story” of Candy’s life will be disappointed. Yet no film about a man who died of a heart attack at age 43 can be without its dark clouds. It adopts a kind of countdown device throughout, displaying the fateful year “1994” on a background of VHS tape fuzz before rolling back in time to play each bit of archival footage. As the end approaches, you want the film to slow down. But time marches on.