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#547 - Candy
Neil Armfield, 2006
A young man and woman fall in love, which is threatened by their combined addictions to heroin.
I'm starting to think that there's a fundamental weakness to movies where the conflict is completely dependent on a character's debilitating drug addiction, especially if the drug in question ends up being heroin. A downward spiral with an apparently foregone conclusion can work, but that's awfully dependent on how much you can make an audience care about the characters even when their fates are probably not going to be good ones. As a result, Candy ends up being a fundamentally boring excuse for a drama as it centres on two pretty young leads in Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. Ledger's character is already a regular heroin user as the film begins and he initiates Cornish's character into his world. Thus begins a chemical romance of fleeting highs and crushing lows as the two get married, move in together, and constantly struggle to feed their habit by any means necessary - when they're not trying to quit, of course. As a result, they go through a lot of the usual trials associated with drug abuse such as resorting to criminal behaviour or sexual favours in order to pay off their expenses, plus their attempts to shake the habit are grim and uncomfortable experiences. Throughout it all, their relationship towards one another is rarely on the up, with sweet little platitudes of eternal love often being buried under domestic disputes and mutually traumatising experiences.
The main problem with Candy is that it is a boring film. It offers no genuinely interesting variations on its tried-and-true drugs-are-bad narrative and offers no surprises to anyone who's already experienced such a narrative before. The closest it does get to being halfway-interesting involves a plot thread where Cornish learns that she is pregnant and thus vows to quit using, but its placement in the middle of the film doesn't do it any favours. Not even featuring talented actors like Ledger or Cornish (or even Geoffrey Rush in a supporting role as a fellow addict) can do enough to salvage such trite melodrama; this is especially true when the two leads play an aspiring poet and starving artist respectively, which only allows the film to be padded with weak visual metaphors and clunky attempts at "deep" writing that don't even feel like they were meant to be clunky. The film's visual direction might have proved a point in the film's favour, but it's all dreadfully straightforward and lacks any possible flair that might help to prop up such a numbing narrative (which is a shame, because a scene where one character comes home to find that the other has written their life story on the walls and then left was admittedly intriguing but only enough so to overcome the rest of the film's dreary nature). Candy is not offensively bad, but it's extraordinarily dry and manages to lack any serious emotional heft despite its apparently devastating narrative. People may not want to watch movies about drug addiction because they're so raw and upsetting; I think I might not want to watch them because seeing one is like seeing them all.
Neil Armfield, 2006
A young man and woman fall in love, which is threatened by their combined addictions to heroin.
I'm starting to think that there's a fundamental weakness to movies where the conflict is completely dependent on a character's debilitating drug addiction, especially if the drug in question ends up being heroin. A downward spiral with an apparently foregone conclusion can work, but that's awfully dependent on how much you can make an audience care about the characters even when their fates are probably not going to be good ones. As a result, Candy ends up being a fundamentally boring excuse for a drama as it centres on two pretty young leads in Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. Ledger's character is already a regular heroin user as the film begins and he initiates Cornish's character into his world. Thus begins a chemical romance of fleeting highs and crushing lows as the two get married, move in together, and constantly struggle to feed their habit by any means necessary - when they're not trying to quit, of course. As a result, they go through a lot of the usual trials associated with drug abuse such as resorting to criminal behaviour or sexual favours in order to pay off their expenses, plus their attempts to shake the habit are grim and uncomfortable experiences. Throughout it all, their relationship towards one another is rarely on the up, with sweet little platitudes of eternal love often being buried under domestic disputes and mutually traumatising experiences.
The main problem with Candy is that it is a boring film. It offers no genuinely interesting variations on its tried-and-true drugs-are-bad narrative and offers no surprises to anyone who's already experienced such a narrative before. The closest it does get to being halfway-interesting involves a plot thread where Cornish learns that she is pregnant and thus vows to quit using, but its placement in the middle of the film doesn't do it any favours. Not even featuring talented actors like Ledger or Cornish (or even Geoffrey Rush in a supporting role as a fellow addict) can do enough to salvage such trite melodrama; this is especially true when the two leads play an aspiring poet and starving artist respectively, which only allows the film to be padded with weak visual metaphors and clunky attempts at "deep" writing that don't even feel like they were meant to be clunky. The film's visual direction might have proved a point in the film's favour, but it's all dreadfully straightforward and lacks any possible flair that might help to prop up such a numbing narrative (which is a shame, because a scene where one character comes home to find that the other has written their life story on the walls and then left was admittedly intriguing but only enough so to overcome the rest of the film's dreary nature). Candy is not offensively bad, but it's extraordinarily dry and manages to lack any serious emotional heft despite its apparently devastating narrative. People may not want to watch movies about drug addiction because they're so raw and upsetting; I think I might not want to watch them because seeing one is like seeing them all.