Bitter 'Candy':
Heath Ledger Revisits the World of Pain

By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 1, 2006; C05


When last we checked in with Heath Ledger, he was a tortured soul in "Brokeback Mountain," his love for another man framed by the majestic peaks of Wyoming, Gustavo Santaolalla's plaintive guitar score and the sense that his personal struggle was part of a larger change in society.

In "Candy," a low-budget Australian indie, we get to watch the actor clean, as it were -- performing without the epic backdrop, music or momentousness. The movie may be a relentless downer -- he plays Dan, a heroin addict whose only purpose is making sure he and his junkie girlfriend, Candy (Abbie Cornish), stay high -- but its lack of frills puts the focus on what Ledger does so well: lure audiences into the dizzying depths of his pain.

For viewers, there's another benefit to the film's thematic gloom and doom: We learn Cornish is something greater than a tabloid distraction. As Dan's protege, her performance deepens and darkens by the minute.

Set in Sydney and chaptered into three sections -- "Heaven," "Earth" and "Hell" -- "Candy" is hardly coy about the sequence of misery facing our romantic mainliners. No sooner has aspiring poet and ne'er-do-well Dan introduced Candy to the needle than they cocoon themselves in a relationship of codependency, delusion and self-destruction. The outside world is a place they visit only to exploit for food or a new fix. Candy's family is good for free dinners, and chemistry professor Casper (a deft Geoffrey Rush), a part-time user himself, "lends" them money or treats them to his own illegal narcotic concoctions.

Inevitably, as their "Heaven" escalates into "Earth" and "Hell" at ever-increasing velocity, love -- their purest bond -- becomes an inevitable casualty.

The movie's intermingling of romance and addiction echoes better pictures such as "Drugstore Cowboy," "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Trainspotting." But if director Neil Armfield and his co-writer, Luke Davies, reprise some well-worn chestnuts of this subgenre -- a time-lapse sequence of Dan and Candy trying to kick the habit comes immediately to mind -- they don't blunt the edginess with cautionary subtext. And they're smart enough to play to the film's obvious strength: The attractive spectacle of Ledger and Cornish makes their love seem as pure and intoxicating as the heroin they spike into their milk-white skin.

As Dan, Ledger seems perpetually zoned out, his eyes practically floating in ocular aspic. But he manages underneath that to broadcast an intense awareness -- the glint of the unblinking crocodile, the calculation of the user. Later, those eyes change to register Dan's anguish, and Ledger, too, tugs at our hearts when he pleads with Candy's father (Tony Martin) for money, like a desperate child.

Cornish stretches beyond the bullishness she showed as a teenage sexual ingenue in "Somersault" to evolve from the wide-eyed beauty who begs Dan to let her inject for the first time to a shrill harridan who accuses him of selfishly shooting up behind her back.

Her character journey doesn't stop there, as what seems to be another film about female victimization turns into something surprisingly different. Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.

Candy (104 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is rated R for pervasive dug use, disturbing images, nudity, sexual scenes and profanity.