In the 1984 Ron Howard comedy “Splash,” Tom Hanks and John Candy play lovelorn Manhattan brothers—one tidy, one rascally—whose lives are upended when Hanks falls in love with a mermaid. On a recent Tuesday, their sons Colin Hanks and Chris Candy, visiting from Los Angeles, took in the site of one of “Splash” ’s climactic scenes, the American Museum of Natural History, where, disguised as Swedish scientists, their dads had raced through the majestic ocean-life exhibit alongside Eugene Levy to rescue the mermaid from a government research lab. Colin Hanks, a forty-seven-year-old actor and director, resembles a younger, intensely thoughtful Tom Hanks; Chris Candy, a forty-one-year-old actor and musician, is bearded, with his late father’s kind eyes. In the vast Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life, they gazed at the ninety-four-foot fibreglass blue whale hanging from the ceiling. “The whale,” Hanks said. “At this angle, it looks like the Starship Enterprise.”
“It looks like a big sunflower seed,” Candy said.
They sat on a bench between the ocean-floor and sea-kelp displays and surveyed the scene: babies staring from strollers while rolling by, whale noises resonating. Colin Hanks directed a new documentary, “John Candy: I Like Me,” in which Chris appears. In it, John Candy, who died at forty-three, of a heart attack, is remembered with admiration and tenderness by his widow, Rose, his daughter, Jen, and Chris; fellow “S.C.T.V.” luminaries, including Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, and Martin Short; and movie co-stars like Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Macaulay Culkin, and Dan Aykroyd. Candy excelled at playing larger-than-life handfuls who reveal hidden depths—see “Uncle Buck” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”—and “Splash” is no exception. “One of the best parts of the doc is when your dad’s talking about that ‘Splash’ scene and breaking down what was happening,” Candy told Hanks. In the scene, the brothers are at the fruit-wholesale company they run together, and Candy interrupts Hanks, who is on a call. “Tom is talking about what my dad was doing in that scene in regards to being inclusive, and breaking this kind of improv with him”—the “yes, and” improv that Candy did at Second City, which Hanks hadn’t done before.
The younger Hanks and Candy first met soon after “Splash” premièred. “Your family came over for dinner,” Hanks said. “I remember very specifically burying a toy in the sand and then not being able to find it. And having to pull my dad away, saying, like, ‘I know you’re having a nice dinner with your friends, but I need you to find this toy.’ An action figure of some sort.” (Big Hanks found it.) Later, at Loyola Marymount, they met again, at a table read.
Ryan Reynolds, a lifelong John Candy fan, produced the documentary and asked Hanks to direct it. Hanks, who has directed two documentary features, thought about a way in. When Chris Candy told him that John’s own father had died young of a heart attack, on John’s fifth birthday, he knew he’d found it. John Candy, a happily married family man who coped with grief in part by being a people pleaser, didn’t always know when to say no; toward the end of his life, he was “just starting to get to that point where you’re having the therapy,” Hanks said. “That’s when the genesis really happened.” Once Candy became a huge star, he continued to worry about getting work—which was one reason that he took a role in a comedy Western shooting in Mexico, where he died. “What really fascinated me was the fact that the things that we love and celebrate about him that are good, that are great, were coping mechanisms from a very, very early trauma,” Hanks said. “And those coping mechanisms were no longer helping him. They were starting to hurt him.”
Hanks wanted his film “to feel like the best of the John Candy movies—to deliver comedy, heart, genuine emotion, and an honesty. The feeling that people have going to the theatre and seeing one of John’s movies. People still remember that.” The pair took a spin through the watery exhibits, and then Hanks clasped his hands together. “Well, are we going to go lie down like everyone else and look up at the whale?” They descended the stairs and flopped down near some hollering schoolkids, the whale’s twenty-one-thousand-pound belly looming over them. “When was the last time you got to lie under the chassis of a blue whale?” Hanks asked.
Candy pondered. “I’m looking at this giant, beautiful animal, and it’s, like—big feelings,” he said. “My dad had big whale feelings that he was trying to grapple with and understand. It takes a lifetime of work, and his therapy was just a drop in the ocean.” ♦
