‘Candy’ shows us ardor and addiction

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 7, 2006

The makers of the Australian film “Candy” have described their movie as a love triangle with “a hero, a heroine and heroin.” That pun sums up this grueling but weirdly lyrical film, which features a strong pair of central performances.

Dan (Heath Ledger) is a self-styled young poet, who believes that his drug use is part of the romantically self-destructive lifestyle that poets should lead. His glowingly fresh new girlfriend, a painter named Candy (Abbie Cornish), wants to share that lifestyle, which means sharing the drugs.

And so both of them are quickly hooked on heroin, although they assure each other they can quit at some future date. The downward spiral commences.

“Candy” is based on a novel by Australian poet Luke Davies, and he and director Neil Armfield have tried to do a tricky thing: to suggest the lushness of love and addiction while showing the toll of drug use.

At times, they nail it, especially in the dreamy visual style of the early part of the picture, and in the intensity of Ledger and Cornish, who do indeed seem rapturously into each other. After “Brokeback Mountain,” Ledger doesn’t have to prove his intensity, but this performance confirms it.

He’s matched by Cornish, a young Australian actress who is apparently about to burst through in U.S. films (she was in the recent “A Good Year”). Although Ledger wears the stringy hair and ghastly pallor of an addict, Cornish looks like a young deer, unblemished by life. That counterpoint helps dramatize her downfall into addiction and prostitution.

Foxy old pro Geoffrey Rush plays Dan’s surrogate father, a parental unit with syringes and questionable advice. One refreshing thing about the film is its respectful treatment of Candy’s parents, played by Tony Martin and Noni Hazlehurst. It’s easy in youth pictures for parents to come across as intrusive nags, but these two, whatever their shortcomings as parents, are basically decent, and heartsick.

The film has some strong sequences, such as Dan and Candy’s modest wedding (he has to shoot up in her parents’ bathroom). Dan also works a credit-card scam, a fascinating sequence that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the picture.

“Candy” is an intriguing movie, although I wonder whether its un-romanticized portrait is actually romantic. Most junkies don’t look like Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. And there’s not a lot here that hasn’t been seen before; this is really “The Days of Wine and Roses,” with heroin substituting for alcohol, and without the Henry Mancini music.

Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish in “Candy.”