Heath Does H.
13 November 2006
by REX REED
Source: NY Observer

Cate Blanchett followed her Oscar-winning success by going home to Australia to play a junkie in a low-budget trash wallow called Little Fish. Quite understandably, it vanished without a trace. Now Heath Ledger has done the same thing. On the crest of a wave after his breakthrough, Academy Award–nominated performance as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, he returned to his native Australia to make Candy, a small independent film about a heroin addict. These Aussies have a need to go home, pump some adrenaline into their anemic film industry, and exorcise some of their demons. When Candy premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mr. Ledger said he did it because it’s been eight years since he’s been able to use his own accent in a film, and because not much is being offered to Australian actors in their own country. Despite the fact that Mr. Ledger has a love-hate relationship with the Australian press, he took the role of a scruffy junkie who drags his own girlfriend into the addict’s world of self-destruction. During his promotional tour for Brokeback Mountain, he made front-page news *when paparazzi accused him of spitting on them, an allegation that was later disproved. They then retaliated by dousing him with water pistols. He sold his house in Australia and now lives with actress Michelle Williams and their daughter in Brooklyn.

But what about Candy? The corny publicity in Australia labeled it “a romantic triangle involving a hero, a heroine, and heroin.” It’s sad, sobering and relentlessly grim, but it deserves more serious attention than that. Stripped of his usual clean-cut appeal, Mr. Ledger plays Dan, a young poet whose addiction threatens to kill what is most precious to him: his beautiful soulmate, a painter named Candy (played by the remarkable newcomer Abbie Cornish). Through their desire to share everything, the two slacker artists begin fresh and full of hope and descend to the depths of Hell. Candy only snorts the white stuff, but it’s not long before she’s injecting, and from that moment on their lives are changed forever. They shoot up riding through a car wash, in the bathtub and public toilets, robbing houses and selling their bodies. The couple get married but find themselves incapable of holding down jobs; always desperate for money for the next hit, the tension of their downward spiral leads to titanic blowouts. When Candy gets pregnant, they make a vow to stop using, but they are helpless. Their problems are compounded by Candy’s terrible relationship with her mother (the fine Australian character actress Noni Hazlehurst), who can see what Dan is doing to her once-precious daughter and hates him for it. They plan to leave Sydney for Melbourne, get on a meth-adone program and quit for good. But by the time their story comes to a tragic end, there’s nothing left of themselves to destroy.

The transformation that Dan and Candy go through, from the puppy love of the opening sequence in an amusement park to the depravity and squalor they later endure, is shocking to watch. The performers rise to the horrors in a big way, with needles in every vein. Geoffrey Rush lends charm as a suave, gay chemistry professor and surrogate father who provides them with the 100 percent pure smack he cooks up in the lab. Mr. Ledger admits he practiced on the veins in a prosthetic arm, and the director, Neil Armfield, milks maximum repulsion from the experience. A well-made but ultimately depressing original take on junkie romance, it is not an entertainment, but it does say a lot about Heath Ledger’s versatility as an actor, and it even contains occasional splashes of dark humor. There have been other movies about heroin addicts, but none more harrowing than Candy.


*edited by HH admin for accuracy.