Review of Candy (2013) by Edith N — 29 Feb 2012

There Is Only One Thing to Love and It Cannot Be You.

This is, alas, a movie which cannot escape its own place in things--it is a movie wherein Heath Ledger battles drug addiction. Now, Ledger's death was officially judged an accident, but it wasn't the kind of accident the characters in this movie would suffer if they "accidentally" overdosed on drugs. Though of course it is still unclear where Ledger got some of the drugs which killed him. I think these people would probably give the Hemingway Defense to justify their drug use, which of course they would never categorize as abuse, whereas I think it's pretty clear that Heath Ledger was self-medicating. Everyone who discusses it agrees that at least half the problem was that he just couldn't sleep, and I don't think anyone takes heroin for that. The character was lost, and the man was still functioning, if not as well as he might. Just because drugs are involved does not make the comparison fair.

Ledger is Dan, poet and heroin addict. He meets art student Candy (Abbie Cornish), who is young and wild and beautiful. They do a lot of heroin and have a lot of sex. They spend time with Caspar (Geoffrey Rush), a professor who enables them so that he can share his addiction with intelligent people, not just the young boys he picks up. They do some pretty awful things to support their habits; she becomes a prostitute. They get married. She gets pregnant, and they decide to go cold turkey and quit the drugs. She loses the baby. They try to live a nice, normal life without drugs, but they don't know how to do that. They love each other fiercely, painfully, and they are very bad for one another. Her parents (Tony Martin and Noni Hazlehurst) watch the dark spiral, but they aren't capable of helping her--we are given the distinct impression that they would have had to have started long before she ever met Dan, and now, it's too late.

Really, the story is only about drugs inasmuch as it is about the couple's own self-destruction. Heroin is their chosen path of doom. However, it would not surprise me if they could have found another one. Alcohol is an easy one. However, about the only drug they really need is each other. This is our old friend obsession returning; we see couples such as these in many movies. We see them drink, drug, gamble, steal, and even kill, all in the name of staying together. In many cases, including this one, the bad behaviour is part of an "us against the world." Candy and Dan are creating a cocoon for just the two of them, and if they behave in ways which displease everyone else, then everyone else will leave them alone in it. Caspar provides them with heroin, so he's okay, and he never tries to part them. But no one else is allowed inside, and if you don't let other people in, you are shutting out a lot of good as well as the bad. What dooms couples such as these is that they don't care.

And, yeah, the heroin doesn't help. Dan is not so innocent as Joe Buck from [i]Midnight Cowboy[/i]--he knows what it takes to support his habit, and he knows that prostituting himself to pay for it will involve sexual activities he isn't comfortable with. He rationalizes Candy's prostitution by saying, you know, she sleeps with men anyway, so it's better. And he either doesn't know or doesn't admit that female prostitutes get AIDS, too. Really, it's just as well that Candy loses the baby, because she's far enough pregnant when they agree to quit that we know she is unlikely to stay clean, and we know the baby is likely to be born with health problems from the mother's habits. Whatever path Candy and Dan follow, it is better that they do not drag a child along it with them. This is usually the case in obsessive screen couples, of course, and not that far off the truth for obsessive real-life couples. The self-destruction is not just mutual, after all, which is part of what leads to this sort of relationship.

I think pleasure can become so tied up in pain that it becomes all but impossible to separate them, and I think that is what the movie is intended to show. Luke Davies, who wrote the novel on which this was based, says that these people are not himself, quite, or specifically any of his friends, either. But what he saw on the screen when he watched the movie was very near to what he lived once. I freely admit that it wasn't until he died that I began to realize what an acting talent was lost four years ago. There are some who will tell you that I only believe it to be so because he's dead now; they haven't heard me talk about certain other people who died young. No, the truth is that it was not until after he died that I was able to look at movies like this instead of movies like [i]A Knight's Tale[/i]. The problem is that he was a young man who was only just beginning to show the extent of his gift, and I hadn't seen the movies like this, which showed it to its best effect. Too late for all of us.