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CANDY
Directed by: Neil Armfield.
Produced by: Margaret Fink & Emile Sherman.
Written by: Armfield & Luke Davies, based on his novel.
Director of Photography: Garry Phillips.
Edited by: Dany Cooper.
Music by: Paul Charlier.
Released by: THINKFilm.
Country of Origin: Australia. 108 Min. Rated R.
With: Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, Geoffrey Rush, Tony Martin, & Noni Hazlehurst.

A raw portrait of a couple in love with heroin as much as they are with each other. Director Neil Armfield’s co-adaptation with Luke Davies of the latter’s novel cuts through the book’s explicit details about sex, drug dealing, and addiction to focus sharply on the passionate connection between erstwhile poet Dan (Heath Ledger) and art student Candy (Abbie Cornish).

Getting to use their native accents in an Australian production (though it could take place anywhere), Cornish is such a beautifully fragile blonde that her ruthlessness is scary (very unlike her insecure teen in Somersault), while Ledger is so intensely masculine that his emotional breakdowns are traumatic. Together the couple very physically embodies the risk-taking behavior that sets off their roller-coaster romance when Candy enthusiastically escalates from experimenter to hooked user, turning a Pulp Fiction-like rescue shot into a shared thrill.

Though recalling movies about lovers eviscerated by addiction from Days of Wine and Roses to Rush and, especially, Requiem for a Dream, their full tilt experiences, in chapters labeled “Heaven,” “Earth,” and “Hell,” are less about the Trainspotting-like physical degradations we’ve seen before than the psychological toll as they compromise everything for the next high. A tense sequence crystallizes the trajectory of Dan and Candy’s relationship. She hocks a family heirloom for a fix. When the pawnshop owner won’t give them enough money, she immediately figures out what she can do to make him pay her more. While Dan waits out in the car, the camera spins around him as he gradually realizes what she’s doing inside. He does nothing; the battle between his physical cravings and his decency are played on Ledger’s face and in the score. The emotive soundtrack ranges from classical requiems when they get high to low-key Australian and American rock, including an elegiac Tim Buckley song as a closer.

Unlike recent equally frank films about individual struggles with addiction, such as Sherrybaby and Factotum, Candy is very much a touching love story, with love as the trigger to spiraling out of control. In several ways, it is like a prequel to last year’s Little Fish, not only because those characters were older Australians struggling with drugs and family, but also by sharing co-star Noni Hazlehurst (as Candy's mother) and a gay dealer, here played as a licentious chemist by Geoffrey Rush, a longtime theater collaborator with Armfield in a role expanded from the book for him. Both films frequently use the same water images as metaphors of isolation, from shooting up in a bathtub, to idyllic swimming, to running in the rain, and crying jags in the shower.

While laying bare how addicts hopelessly lie, cheat, and steal, Armfield ties together the hand-held documentary-like shots with the striking visual metaphors of isolation through Ledger’s sonorous narration that just barely leads us to believe in the power of people to change their lives. Nora Lee Mandel
November 17, 2006