22 December 2006

CINEMA
Financial Mail

A dubious freedom
By Peter Wilhelm

Movie about two young addicts is a near-masterpiece that you may not want to see.



It could easily be dismissed as an Australian addiction opera - Trainspotting Down Under - but Candy is redeemed by two extraordinarily vital performances. As Dan and Candy, Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish are much more than just young and naive. They are tangibly in love, mad about each other, and many will find their mutual annihilation by heroin harrowing. They understand their fatal trajectory - yet no-one, neither their parents nor any authority, has taught them how to survive, and their hideous tale has the strange luminosity of tragedy.

The film - for all that its narrative has a certain obviousness - has high artistic claims, which Neil Armfield (who co-wrote the script) goes a long way towards vindicating.

It is set out in three overlapping Dantesque stages (portentously named "heaven", "earth", and "hell"), and in the first it illuminates a truth seldom told about drugs - that particularly for children without personal or social hope, this is their only freedom from a brutal, crushing reality. We know little of Dan's background; he is essentially an orphan, crooked as any street scavenger yet capable of tenderness and charm. Ledger (this is the point) begins as almost anyone's shining son.

Candy's mother and father (Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin) vacillate between ignorance, anger and pity but cannot help. Their repressive effect on the hapless girl (who falls into prostitution as the only thing she might be any good at) is visible in her crooked, anguished fists, signalling the metaphysical despair her suburban family cannot see.

Dan would like to be a poet, Candy an artist - but these are floating dreams, swept away by need; as they disintegrate, so do their words and images.

There is a third figure in this closed, self-consuming universe. In a riveting performance, Geoffrey Rush - as another, far older addict - plays mentor, father figure, Mephistopheles and supplier to the lovers.

For a time this outsider occupies a place in the wider world - as a university-appointed professor of pharmacology who manufactures drugs for his evanescent rent boys, and understands the terrible morphology of addiction. "When you can stop," he tells Candy and Dan, "you don't want to. When you want to, you can't." And, tenderly, he almost prays for the comatose Dan to "stop before me", which in the aesthetic architecture of the film means only one thing: death.

*** MAJOR SPOILER ALERT *** HIGHLIGHT TO READ *** MAJOR SPOILER ALERT ***

Over and again, small incidents or comments lead us deeper into the pity of it all. When Candy's parents are invited to Sunday lunch, they are greeted with filth and rotten, uncooked food. By now Dan and Candy are married; yet they do not even know what it means to cook. To let some light into the wretched shack they inhabit (at state expense) while attempting to kick drugs, they simply cut a ragged hole in the roof.

There is a darkly comic interlude (remembering Ledger's role in Brokeback Mountain) when Dan, who is straight, asks the Rush character for advice on how to become a male hooker and whether an erection is sometimes necessary. "It would help," is the reply. Yet at the same time Dan rounds on Candy in rage and jealousy when she casually sleeps with a stranger out of plain human lust rather than "working".

The scene in which Candy gives birth to a dead, malformed foetus - yet weeps to embrace its corpse - is almost unbearable. It directly echoes a strong, frightening poem by Paul Durcan, "The death by heroin of Sid Vicious": "Many did not make it, although their unborn children did." Never even alive, the tiny thing is nonetheless free.

A near-masterpiece you may not wish to see.


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