Candy

Candy. Directed by Neil Armfield, 2006.

I'm really not sure where to begin this review. I guess I would start by saying that as far as I can recall no movie has ever made me more angry than this one. I walked out of the theater the second the credits started to roll, absolutely fuming. I needed to blow off steam before rejoining the rest of the group as they left the cinema.

Starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, Candy is a film about a love triangle. The love between Candy, Dan, and the love both share for heroin. The film alternates between the two of them having sex and the two of them shooting up. As the film goes on the sex between them becomes less, and the amount of time they spend hopped up on heroin goes up....which is a real shame for Heath because Abbie Cornish is gorgeous.....and that brings me to the first of many issues I had with this film.

No matter how much of a junkie Candy becomes, she never looks worse for wear beyond the minor bags under her eyes that most of us get from our daily lives. The entire experience is glamourized taking away any sense of impact the film struggles so hard to create. Heath at times looks horrendous, but even that lasts for only a shot or two, before there is a cut to a different angle where Heath looks perfectly fine again even though we are still witnessing the same scene, the same conversation.

That alone would not be enough to sink the movie, but it seems the director got so caught up in the physical aspects of Dan and Candy's relationship that he forgot to flesh the characters out beyond the most superficial of characters. Dan is the stereotypical slacker that Candy's father is of course decidedly skeptical about., "How is Dan going to provide for his daughter" is the number one concern on his mind. Candy is the perfect daughter who likes art. All she needed was a childhood passion for ponies and the stereotypical portrait would be complete.

We never get to see how the two meet. We don't even get to see what Candy ever found alluring about Dan in the first place. From the moment he first shows up on screen he is shooting up. There is the eventual revelation that Candy's relationship with her mother has in part driven her to the life she now finds herself living, but even that is barely touched on. Where that would have been an interesting path to delve into, Armfield seems to feel that the audience would be more interested in seeing Dan and Candy sink further into the clutches of drugs.

The result is that there is never anything to anchor either of these characters, leaving the audience hard pressed to find anything in either of them to indentify with or care about. The whole point of this type of tragedy is that in fact it is a tragedy. With Candy the only tragedy that is evident would be the fact that Candy spends less and less time on her art and more time doing drugs. By the last half hour of the film, I was begging for it be over because each successful scene simply made me despise each character exponentially more than I had a few minutes before.

With all this being said, this alone should not have caused me to be as upset as I was when I left the film. And I really had to consider why I had such a personally strong reaction to this movie. What I can come up with is that I have witnessed friends who have completely destroyed their lives through drugs and it is a deeply tragic and saddening thing to see. I don't feel that Candy really got this; instead, I feel Candy is a film that is simply trying to exploit the previous success of films in the 'drug' genre. Candy is quite derivative of films such as Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream, but where those films had a soul and held nothing back in showing the truly ugly nature of chronic drug use, Candy simply felt like a film that was made with no true interest in the subject matter and all the interest in filling seats at your local theater.

*One Star