The future's uncertain and the end is always near
— The Doors, "Roadhouse Blues"
Watching and rewatching John Candy movies as a child, there was a lot I simply wasn't equipped to pick up on. I saw ONLY THE LONELY more times than I can count, and yet it remained my least favorite of the Candy films I considered at least passable. I kept coming back to it anyway, figuring that if I watched it enough times, eventually I'd catch whatever I had missed. I suppose I finally have, though repetition wasn't really the answer. Like THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, ONLY THE LONELY is something that takes a little age and wisdom to appreciate.
ONLY THE LONELY undersold itself on the way out the door. Marketed on Candy's name, it walked into an audience already primed for a comedy, and delivered a drama with comedy folded into it instead. Approached as a Candy vehicle, Rose can read as an obstacle keeping Danny from whatever plot he's supposedly in; approached on its own terms, she is the plot. Not every laugh here earns its place the same way — a few carry the faint whiff of contractual obligation, as if a certain number of jokes per reel came bundled with the casting — but the ones that land hardest belong specifically to Danny rather than generically to Candy. The cutaways where guilt sends him spiraling into some worst-case vision of what's happened to his mother the moment he's out of the house are funny precisely because they're symptoms: a joke built out of one particular man's particular damage reads differently than a pratfall would, and that's the difference between a bit and a character trait.
That distinction was deliberate. Columbus has said casting Candy meant reaching past the persona: "We got the 'real' John Candy, beyond the facade." Hughes described the same choice in blunter terms, admiring the nerve it took for Candy to say, in effect, "The things I do best, I'm gonna set them aside and try something else." And Belushi — cast as Sal, the one member of the ensemble whose whole job is comic relief — supplies the best evidence the gamble paid off: recalling a scene where his character is scripted to laugh at something Danny says, he admitted flatly, "That was me really laughing, not my character." A film that gets an actual, unplanned laugh out of its designated comic relief has found a funnier register than asking him to be funny ever could.
Danny and Theresa like each other almost on contact, and the film doesn't dress that up as some slow thaw. A cop who spends his shifts around whatever trouble the public generates and a mortuary cosmetician who spends hers making up the dead to look presentable for viewing turn out to have more in common than either would probably admit, both drawing a paycheck in regular proximity to death, only at different stages of the process. The film gets specific comic mileage out of that overlap rather than treating it as incidental set dressing: Danny asks her out mid-shift, with an actual body in front of him, and the scene plays the mismatch for exactly what it is instead of cutting away from the discomfort. He leaves on the kind of high only a successful ask produces, grinning at nobody in particular, and walks straight into a clutch of pallbearers arriving for a different service entirely — Candy doesn't have to do anything but let Danny's face catch up to the space he's wandered into, and it's the funniest beat in the sequence for being the least engineered.
None of that chemistry would matter much if the film then spent its second half correcting Theresa, the way THE BREAKFAST CLUB — Sheedy, six years earlier — eventually does to Allison: introverted and strange until a makeover scene reintroduces her as conventionally pretty and, not coincidentally, more legible to Emilio Estevez. ONLY THE LONELY doesn't run that play. Theresa stays quiet, stays a little odd, and the film lets the oddness stay hers rather than something to be talked out of her: she styles her corpses to resemble movie stars, a private flourish that isn't being performed for Danny, evidence of an interior life running at full strength whether anyone appreciates it or not. Danny's interest in her arrives without an asterisk requiring she eventually stop being that person.
Why the performance works as well as it does gets easier to understand once the line "Ever since my dad died I've been in charge" is set next to the man delivering it, not just the character saying it. Candy lost his own father at five, decades before anyone thought to build him a part around that kind of premature responsibility, and Columbus didn't back into the resemblance by accident — he wrote ONLY THE LONELY with Candy specifically in mind, and Candy knew it: "Nobody thinks of me in this kind of role," he told Columbus once he understood what had been done for him. "Thanks so much." None of that amounts to Candy simply playing himself. Danny is a fictional Chicago cop with a fictional dead father, and nothing in his file matches Candy's own biography point for point. What the record does explain is the specific muscle the role asked him to use, and how rarely audiences had been allowed to watch him use it for this long.
Candy turned forty about a month into the shoot, a milestone his own father never reached — dead at thirty-five, meaning by his own reckoning Candy had already outlived him. Months later, taping a Tonight Show spot built around the finished film, he was reportedly more rattled than his friend Robert Crane Jr. had ever seen him, pulling back his jacket backstage to show off sweat rings and asking if there was any way out of going on at all; Crane's answer, as he remembers it, was that Maureen O'Hara and Johnny Carson had made that impossible. Candy had spent years being funny in front of millions. Now he was promoting a film built around the part of himself audiences weren't accustomed to seeing, and backstage he was sweating through his shirt.
Go. Marry that girl. Have lots of Irish-dago mutts.
— Rose Muldoon
Rose's whole contradiction sits in two lines spoken minutes apart. "I don't hurt people," she says at one point, flat, a statement of fact about herself. Then, not long after, walking back something she's done: "I don't mean to hurt people. Really." The second version concedes what the first one denies, and the gap between them is close to her entire arc in miniature — not a woman who doesn't hurt people, but one who's spent a long time believing the denial hard enough to keep functioning, sabotaging Danny's chances and her own peace with roughly equal enthusiasm and calling neither one intentional.
She's a cartoon only if you don't look closely. Played broadly, an overbearing widowed mother running interference on her adult son's love life reads like a type assembled from other movies' spare parts; played as specifically as O'Hara plays her, she reads like somebody's actual mother — the kind of figure who turns up often enough in large Irish-Catholic families that the surprise isn't that she exists, it's how rarely she gets written this precisely. The film gives her prejudice a specific shape rather than a generic one, too: Theresa's family is Sicilian and Polish, not Irish, and Rose's objections keep circling back to that fact in ways that have nothing to do with whether Theresa is good for Danny. None of that earns her tactics a pass for being recognizable — the crack about Theresa's figure and the insinuation about her drinking aren't secondhand prejudice relayed from somewhere else, they're things Rose says to Theresa's face at dinner, with Danny sitting right there to hear it. The large-Irish-family defense explains where Rose comes from. It doesn't extend to where she's willing to take it.
The screenplay's small mechanics do more work than the film's reputation as pleasant-but-slight generally credits them for. It opens on a death and very nearly turns on another: the corpse two men carry into the bar early on isn't an atmospheric flourish, it's the reason Danny meets Theresa and her father at all — remove that corpse from the scene and there's no movie. Near the end, a different death does the opposite kind of work: Doyle, an old man with no family and few friends left to notice he's gone, dies right as Danny is packing to leave for Florida with Rose. Doyle is the future Danny suddenly realizes he might be building for himself. What lets him reach her at all is a smaller, neater piece of plotting: Theresa is the one who has to prepare Doyle's body, and by the time Danny works up the nerve to go after her, her train has already left the station. He doesn't beat the clock — he uses what he has instead, a police connection with enough pull to get a departed train stopped so he can still get to her. One death opens the picture by putting Theresa in Danny's path; a second one closes it, not with good timing but with Danny using what his job gives him.
Spats gets there first, structurally speaking. His "don't spend your life full of regrets" lands early enough that it's easy to file away as a barroom platitude, the kind of thing regulars say to each other without either one really listening — right up until it turns out to be the exact instruction Danny eventually follows. There are smaller pleasures around the edges, too, like Columbus finding room for John Davis Chandler, his wonderfully unsettling Bleak from ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, in a cameo that lasts barely long enough to register. Recognizing him doesn't change anything, but that's part of the pleasure: even the margins have faces in them.
The reconciliation at the train station gets everything right and still feels rushed getting there. Danny's apology, his confession, Theresa's admission that she loves him too, his promise that she comes first now — the content of the scene is exactly what the rest of the film has patiently earned, and it still plays like the movie is in more of a hurry to close than its characters ever were to open up. What surrounds that scene does more of the real work than the scene itself. Rose gets her own small ending on a plane instead of a train, holding Nick's hand because her son finally gave up a seat instead of a duty. Danny's whole arc has been one of accommodation — his brother, his mother, his own fear of what happens if he stops managing everyone — and the last real choice he makes in the film is the culmination of all the smaller choices he's begun making for himself. Theresa's version of the same idea is quieter and arguably braver: having already walked away once, cleanly, she's the one who has to decide whether to risk being disappointed by the same man twice. And Danny's final vision — Rose and Nick fending off hijackers together mid-flight — was surely meant as pure comic relief, an overprotective son's fantasy played for a laugh. It lands differently now, carrying a weight the joke couldn't possibly have anticipated.
What the film is really about, underneath the plot mechanics, is easier to see if you set the romantic resolution aside and look at how crowded it is with lonely people. Danny, Theresa, Rose, Nick, even Doyle at the end — each represents a different response to the possibility of being left alone, and the closest thing the film has to a moral is that the risk of connection is worth taking over the certainty of not being hurt by it. It's a modest, well-worn point for a film to make, and ONLY THE LONELY earns it anyway, mostly by refusing to let anyone get there easily.
There's a detail from the shoot itself worth sitting with rather than explaining. The train station scene, the one this review has already flagged as too brief, was filmed on location in Niles, Michigan, dressed with Christmas lights for the occasion. During that same stretch of location work, Candy was known to sit up in his hotel room unable to sleep alone, holding court in a bathrobe with an ice bucket of drinks, pulling people in to talk rather than let the room go quiet. None of that explains the performance he gives in that station. It doesn't need to — the two are simply true at the same time, in the same town.
Final Verdict: 86 out of 100
Sidenote: Jim Belushi isn't exactly being asked to stretch much here — sleazy cop is comfortably inside his wheelhouse — but I like him in the part. Sal shows up in short bursts, gets his laughs, and never hangs around long enough to wear out his welcome.