MOVIE REVIEW: 'CANDY'
Hold the Roses: Days of Heroin and Hookers
BY JAN STUART
Newsday Staff Writer

November 17, 2006

The tormented specters of Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon hover over Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger throughout "Candy," a piercing drama from Australia that retraces the punishing geography of addiction.

Some 44 years have passed since Remick and Lemmon bottomed out on booze in "Days of Wine and Roses." While time may have altered the poison of choice, the stakes haven't diminished, nor has the pathway out become any less hellish.

From the outset, heroin is the glue that binds Cornish and Ledger's inseparable twosome Candy and Dan, a painter and poet who survive off whatever Dan can squeeze out of Candy's unsuspecting middle-class dad (Tony Martin) and an avuncular, gay academic friend (Geoffrey Rush) who shares their worship of the needle.

Shoplifting helps, but the slope is short and slippery from nicking sunglasses to turning tricks and lifting wallets. Degradation doesn't deter the couple from tying the knot, nor does persistent indigence ward off pregnancy. If the prospect of familial responsibility prompts them to seek a way out of their dependency, finding the right door is a whole other story.

Adapted with uncommon articulateness by Luke Davies and director Neil Armfield from Davies' 1997 novel, "Candy" is narrated by Dan in three chapters, a backward glancing literary device that signals bad news from its ominously upbeat part one title ("Heaven").

If the characters' trajectory feels pre-ordained, the actors force us to sit up and pay attention with renewed focus. The fresh-faced Cornish, so weightless opposite Russell Crowe in "A Good Year" that she evaporated before our eyes, invests the mercurial Candy with a credible balance of effusion and confusion. The risk-prone Ledger counters his stoic "Brokeback Mountain" triumph with a commensurately nuanced performance that should put to rest any lingering suspicions that he is just another pretty Australian actor with a canny casting agent and good dialect coach.


Source: NewsDay