TIFF, the country’s marquee film festival, rolls out the red carpet for celebs and Oscar hopefuls – and reminds us why John Candy was once dubbed Johnny Toronto.
At first glance, a documentary about John Candy may seem an unlikely choice to open the 50th anniversary edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 4-14). The beloved Canadian actor, whose life was cut short 31 years ago at the age of 43, is most famous for starring in a string of Hollywood comedies written and/or directed by John Hughes – Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck and Home Alone. And these kinds of studio blockbusters rarely have any use for a festival premiere. Candy’s career happened on another planet. Also, because TIFF needs movie stars on the red carpet opening night, it’s not inclined to throw documentaries into that spotlight. Only three have kicked off the festival in its entire history, and all were about rock stars who made a splash at the premieres: Bono, David Byrne and Robbie Robertson.
But as it turns out, John Candy: I Like Me is a supremely appropriate choice to inaugurate this milestone edition of a festival that was built on the faith and frenzy of its local audience. The film pays tribute to one of Toronto’s favourite sons – an avid citizen who earned the nickname Johnny Toronto, who cut his teeth at the Old Firehall’s Second City Theatre, and who blazed the trail for his SCTV cohorts as he became Hollywood’s biggest Canadian comedy star since Michael J. Fox. What’s more, in a town where nothing mattered more than sports, Candy was a Toronto Argonauts superfan who virtually bought the team their 1991 Grey Cup win by purchasing the franchise with Wayne Gretzky and Bruce McNall, and bankrolling the acquisition of red-hot running back Pinball Clemons. So for a festival that used to go out of its way to kick off a Canadian movie (24 of them in its first three decades, yet only two in the past 15 years), Candy arrives as a long-overdue celebration of a hometown hero.
To be fair, finding a strong Canadian film that also fits the crowd-pleasing mandate of an opening gala was never easy. Even during the prime of Canadian cinema, when TIFF opened with masterpieces like David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, these dramas of drug-addicted twin gynecologists and a fatal school bus crash didn’t exactly send audiences skipping out of the theatre into party mode.
This year, however, the occasion and the film seem made for each other, as memories of the festival and memories of John Candy are filtered through the same warm lens of nostalgia. And doubling down on the opening night Cancon, the gala screening will be followed by the Midnight Madness premiere of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a riotous new comedy from Toronto actor-director Matt Johnson (Blackberry), who at 39 has grabbed the torch from the SCTV generation and turned into a millennial flamethrower. Shot guerilla-style in the streets of the city’s downtown core, it has to be the most Torontonian movie ever made and one of the funniest to ever come out of Canadian cinema.
Candy: I Like Me, meanwhile, is technically not a Canadian movie. It’s a U.S. production financed by Amazon and directed by American Colin Hanks. But it’s saturated in maple syrup. The producer is Vancouver-born star Ryan Reynolds, whose cast of interview subjects include Canadian comedy icons Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy – along with Bill Murray Steve Martin and Colin’s father, Tom Hanks.
“Colin and Ryan made a movie that is so much fun to watch,” TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey told Zoomer. “It’s a love letter to John Candy, of course, but also a vivid look back at the incredible creative atmosphere in Toronto that propelled John and SCTV out to the whole world.”
Meanwhile, the festival’s program note on the film promises it will “provoke tears of joy, loss and blissful laughter,” while singling out Colin Hanks, who pays tribute to Candy’s comic genius, “taking care to highlight the tenderness and depth found in quieter performances.”
One of those moments is the hotel-room scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, after Del Griffith, Candy’s jolly slob of a travelling salesman, is cut to the quick by a contemptuous takedown from his reluctant road buddy, played by Steve Martin. “Well, you think what you want about me,” says Candy, his voice trembling. “I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. Because I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.”
That line, which provided the documentary’s subtitle, could have been about Candy himself. And the scene showed that behind the comedian’s merry disposition lay a vulnerable soul and a seriously talented dramatic actor. In interviews with friends and family, the documentary explores the issues that shadowed Candy’s life and work – his chronic anxiety, his sensitivity to fat shaming, his struggle to lose weight. The actor, who lost his father to a heart attack three days before his fifth birthday, lived with grave worries about health, which were born out in 1993 with his death from heart failure in a Mexican hotel room during a miserable shoot of a comic western called Wagons East.
Now, more than three decades after he left us, Candy is having a moment. In October, as the documentary is released on Amazon Prime, Anansi Press will publish John Candy: A Life in Comedy, a definitive biography of the actor by Paul Myers (Mike Myers’ brother). And while the book features many of the same voices that are in the film, Myers says it was written independently and he has yet to see the documentary.
What seems most enduring about Candy’s legacy, aside from his performances, is a general consensus that this was the nicest guy in show business – a kind man with a huge heart, boundless generosity, who loved hosting lavish all-night parties.
And as it happens, TIFF played a minor but historic role in the actor’s early career. Like anyone in the Toronto film community, Candy would have frequented the festival back in the day. But his name crops up only once in an official capacity. In 1978, he had a supporting part as an affable bank teller in The Silent Partner, a Canadian heist thriller set in a bank in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. Holding his own opposite Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer, Candy turned heads in his first non-comic role, and his first appearance in a successful, widely acclaimed movie. The Silent Partner premiered at TIFF’s early incarnation, the Festival of Festivals, then won three Canadian Film Awards, including Best Picture. The awards were part of the festival that year, and Candy co-hosted the ceremony with Catherine O’Hara.
The Canadian film community was a cozy place back then. And the festival was its frontier saloon with swinging doors wide open to the world. You never knew who you might run into. That year at the post-awards party, you would have expected to see the jury president Robbie Robertson, but he had already skipped town, having burned through a case of champagne in his hotel room instead of watching films. And you probably wouldn’t expect to bump into media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. But there he was, his pop culture cred riding high after his priceless cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall the previous year. Most likely, Candy was at the party, and one can only imagine what a conversation between McLuhan and Candy would sound like. But at the time, “John was really shy,” recalls Bill House, who helped produce the awards show. “And he had no idea he was going to be famous.”
These days, between the velvet ropes and the VIP rooms, celebs are more elusive prey at TIFF parties. But they will show up in force, stopping downtown traffic, slipping in and out of limos, passing through adoring throngs amid a blaze of cameras. Those expected to attend this year include Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Jodie Foster, Daniel Craig, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Cillian Murphy, Seth Rogen, Keanu Reeves and Glenn Close. To name a few. And here the Oscar campaign will start its engines. Some of the early contenders include Toronto expat Guillermo Del Toro’s magnum opus, Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac playing scientist to Jacob Elordi’s monster; Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as Mr. and Mrs. William Shakespeare; and Stellan Skarsgård vying for Best Actor with his tour de force as an irascible filmmaker in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a Norwegian gem that seems guaranteed go beyond the foreign film niche and score in the major categories.
But at this point, it’s all idle speculation as the parade passes through. A festival, like a movie, is a memory machine. The magic happens in the theatre, not on the red carpet. And with the right kind of movie, an iconic actor who is unable to attend the festival in the flesh may be more emotionally present than one who is, via the time-travel portal of the big screen. If the stars align for TIFF’s golden anniversary, John Candy: I Like Me might just be one of those pictures.
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