[Review / Interview] A pair of star-crossed lovers: Candy

By Phillip Cenere

May, 2006

Phillip Cenere reviews Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish's confronting new film, Candy (2006), and speaks with screenwriter and director Neil Armfield.

Lovers whose relationship is doomed to fail are said to be ‘star-crossed’ (frustrated by the stars), because those who believe in astrology claim that the stars control human destiny. William Shakespeare used the phrase to describe the lovers in Romeo and Juliet. [1]

Inside a spinning room at an amusement park two young lovers desperately cling to one another, struggling to fight the forces of gravity. Completely engrossed in the moment, they are oblivious to the outside world and the rules that govern it. They’re infatuated only with the feeling of being in love – nothing else needs matter, for as long as they stay together they can use each other to survive the merry-go-round. This, the opening scene of Candy is a fitting metaphor for the chaos that will befall the film’s lead characters.

Dan (Heath Ledger), a lanky loafer with a swimmer’s build who dabbles in writing poetry and drug taking, is the embodiment of every mother’s worst fears. Candy (Abbie Cornish), a sweet innocent girl who grew up and filled out in all the right places, makes for every father’s worst nightmare. Together they are star-crossed – destined for a catastrophic ending.

An aspiring artist Candy aches to rebel against her parents, loose her inhibitions and start living. ‘I’ve been clenching my fists since I was six years old,’ she says. ‘I can’t unclench my fists!’ In Dan she finds her escape and they begin using heroin, stealing and conning to buy their next fix. Soon Candy starts prostituting herself. Says Dan: ‘Events tumble and the years pile up…the world’s very bewildering to a junkie.’

The couple marry and she becomes pregnant. With drug money running low Dan and Candy go and see Casper (Geoffrey Rush), a university professor who becomes a surrogate father and mentor to them. Casper is a poler opposite of how a father should be. An aging homosexual, he’s a junkie himself, and instead of steering the young lovers in the right direction, supplies them with free heroin and a safe place to shoot-up.

The free-spirited professor casts a strong contrast to Candy’s real parents Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt played by Tony Martin (The Interview, 1998) and Noni Hazlehurst (Little Fish, 2005). The Wyatts obviously disapprove of Dan but like many parents when they’re introduced to their daughter’s new boyfriend they bite their tongues, wait, and hope she’ll come to her senses soon. It’s in watching them watch their daughter self-destruct that makes for some of the film’s most gut-wrenching and powerful moments. They help us see past our own preconceptions about drug users, past the stereotypes, and remind us that every addict is somebody’s child.

Director Neil Armfield (The Castanet Club, 1990) divides the film into three sections titled ‘Heaven,’ ‘Earth’ and ‘Hell,’ with each act revealing a different stage in Candy and Dan’s relationship. Armfield, who’s currently the artistic director of Company B, one of Australia's most respected theatre groups, doesn’t hold back any punches when it comes to depicting the horrors of a junkie’s life, going so far as to show a stillbirth in full graphic detail.

But Candy shouldn’t be confused as a story solely about the consequences of drug addiction. It is at its core a love story, an emotional roller-coaster ride about lust, survival, and the decisions we make in life. There’s a Shakespearian quality to the characters reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and a feeling of doom and tragedy lingers over them throughout their journey.

Candy is based on Luke Davies’ novel of the same title, which in 1998 was short-listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Awards. Davies co-wrote the script with Armfield, but, regrettably, despite the book’s accolade the screenplay lacks the subplots, background and complexities that could have enriched and propelled the film from good to great. I’m speaking of the insider-knowledge and intricate nuances found in such works as Kate Holden’s critically acclaimed book In My Skin [2], a fearless self-portrait about her experiences as a prostitute and junkie in St. Kilda, Melbourne, that would have created a much more powerful picture.

The film also falls short of the originality and eccentricities found in other works of the same genre - it’s a far cry from Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). Admittedly, part of the problem is that Candy is being released on the heels of Rowan Woods’ Little Fish (2005), starring Cate Blanchett (The Aviator, 2004), which also dealt with heroin addiction, and, featured Noni Hazlehurst in a very similar role. However this isn’t the main concern. Candy includes several scenes that appear to be cut-and-paste jobs from other films, leaving audiences with a feeling of déjà vu and left wondering ‘haven’t we seen this before?’ A scene in which Candy overdoses and Dan injects her with a saline solution is too similar to a scene in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) where Vincent Vega (John Travolta) stabs a passed-out Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) with an adrenalin needle. A scene in which Candy and Dan embrace underwater in a swimming pool is a duplicate of scenes in Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996) and Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995), and about a dozen other movies. This is hard to excuse especially as Candy was produced by Margaret Fink (My Brilliant Career, 1979) and Emile Sherman (The Night We Called It A Day, 2003), so the talent was there to recognise these faux pas and fix them during the script development phase.

Despite these problems Candy is still an enveloping experience, mainly due to its stellar cast. I’d seen Abbie Cornish’s talent and range as an actor in Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2005) and so wasn’t surprised that she was equally engaging in this film. However I was completing taken aback by Heath Ledger’s performance. Not a big fan of his before seeing this picture I was really caught off-guard by the honesty and intensity he brought to the screen. Ledger, who earlier this year was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), brings humility to Dan, even evoking sympathy for him, a character that audiences are itching to despise.

Geoffrey Rush (Munich, 2005) is also electrifying in the role of Casper, delivering some of the films most hilarious lines: ‘This is Jorge,’ he says introducing he’s latest boyfriend. ‘Very limited English, but a very large penis.’

It is a combination of this brash humour, the passionate affair of two young lovers, and the heartbreaking and brutal illustration of heroin addiction, that makes Candy so intoxicating to watch and a whirlwind of a film.

Interview with Neil Armfield:

Phillip Cenere: The film is based on Luke Davies’ novel. What was it about the novel that made you want to take it to the screen?

I love the sense of humour and the poetry of the book. I was really drawn to the idea of doing a film, which was extremely intimate, and looking at human behaviour, love and addiction. I found the book absolutely gripping and thought that it would be an amazing film.

We’ve had several films about junkies and prostitution – Trainspotting and more recently Little Fish. How did you go about making your film unique within that genre?

I think that there is a kind of classicism to the way the story is filmed, and there’s a sense of the poetics of the book, which is quite different to what is perhaps a grittier and kind of comic world in Trainspotting – the kind of grunge of that world. I don’t think it mirrors Little Fish. They’re actually entirely different worlds. And even Noni’s character is very different. There’s a sort of study of a rather repressive middle-class woman in Candy, dealing with a very difficult relationship with her daughter. Noni in Little Fish is a working class battler who has pulled the family up by their bootstraps. It’s a very different social situation.

I thought the scenes between Tony Martin and Noni Hazlehurst as the helpless parents trying to save their daughter from a destructive boyfriend were probably the most powerful in the film.

Oh, good. I came in with a great interest in the parents. The parents are only there in one scene of the book, just about, and I encouraged Luke to think about broadening the focus of the film. I thought that would be a way for a much wider audience to enter into the story – through the eyes of the parents. One of the things that Geoffrey Rush said when he first saw a cut of the film was that every character in the film turns a hundred and eighty degrees. I hadn’t realized that until he mentioned it.

I must admit I wasn’t much of a Heath Ledger fan before seeing the film but I was completely caught off guard by his performance – the depth and the intensity he brought to the screen.

I’m thrilled that you say that because you know a number of people have said this…just how incredibly subtle he is. He has such great physical comedy, but more than anything I think that there is this incredible optimism in the character that Heath found. I think that that character, in another actor’s hands, could’ve easily become very unsympathetic and I think it’s crucial to the film that you keep hoping for Dan and Candy all the way through. And really, Heath is the key to that. And I’m really proud of his performance, and he is too.

He sort of embodies every parent’s worst nightmare in this film?

[Laughs] Indeed. He is a long way from what one would call Mr. Right.

There are several nude scenes between Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. Is it difficult to direct a sex scene?

[Laughs] Yeah, it is actually. It’s always a little bit of a thing on the schedule. You don’t schedule it too early in the shoot…you don’t schedule it too late…we talked about that a lot beforehand. Abbie was concerned that the stuff wouldn’t be exploitative, and so I think we handled it responsibly, but at the same time, they’re actors and there’s a reality to what the characters are and there’s a sort of sensuality. But it’s not a ‘nudes go berserk’ kind of thing. That first scene where they undress in the hallway… they’re sort of banging against the wall and there’s a wonderful sense of abandonment…that was just them…that’s what they did on the day.

Is it a challenge to make it look fresh and original? Because there are so many sex scenes in films these days, it’s been done in every possible position.

[Laughs]. Indeed. Well that’s one of the things Margaret [Fink] said: ‘There’s nothing more boring than watching fucking on screen.’ And so you just try and make it true and try and get rid of the clichés out of your head I suppose.

There’s a particularly confronting moment in Candy where a stillbirth is shown. Why did you choose to make it so graphic, and was there some hesitation about doing that?

It’s a very tiny moment. The image is on the screen for almost as short as it can take for you to register what it is. We could have done it without ever seeing the child, but it is such a total loss for Dan and Candy…they’re these young kids, and they thought that ‘If we have a baby it will solve our problems.’ And for a moment it’s like ‘this is what their actions have led to’, and there’s this kind of terrible inversion of family, where there’s a father and a mother and a dead child. And, yeah, it was my judgement that that was what we needed to see. The intention was to put you more into their eyes. It should be shocking.

Geoffrey Rush always manages to steal every scene he’s in regardless of what film he’s doing. Were you concerned that he would outshine the leads? And what was he like to work with?

I was never concerned that he would outshine the leads. Geoffrey and I’ve worked together for twenty years in the theatre. Casper was a smaller role in the book than he is in the film, by building up the role we were writing it specifically for Geoffrey – which is a great thing…to know an actor’s voice and to write to that voice. We kind of know each other backwards. I think in some ways for Abbie and Heath it might have been a little bit confronting…[they] were surrounded by actors who had worked with me in the theatre, and I think that it took a while for us all to kind of play in the same rhythm if you know what I mean. The great thing about Geoffrey is that he has a fantastic sense of where his body is in a landscape. He has this ability to play with words and actions and throw it across to the other person.

Your background is mainly in theatre. How is directing for the screen different to directing for the stage?

It’s very, very different…I have done a three part miniseries and a couple of television films, but you know it’s another world. Doing a feature film is different. I was really grateful to have two lead actors of Heath and Abbie’s intuition because there’s a point where the director can’t take responsibility. You can lead the actors and you can control the shot, but the actual relationship between the camera and the actor is something that the actor has to be so intuitively fluid and spontaneous with, and that’s where Heath and Abbie are masters I think.

How important was it to have John Collee – co-writer of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003) – onboard as a script editor?

He was a crucial element. John was really the person that helped us take a number of incidents and shape them into an organic journey. Luke and I had a lot of voice over in our early drafts…we got rid of that. John really helped us reorganize the material that we had in a way that built it up to a much stronger, emotional point of release.

You took Candy to the Berlin Film Festival – how was it received?

Wonderfully. It was thrilling being in the huge machine of an international film festival like that. There were two thousand people in the cinema and this amazing huge and prolonged applause at the end. The next day we woke up and there’s a series of journalists coming in, many of whom had seen the film and been greatly moved by it. We didn’t win The Golden Bear, but we never expected to really.

Finally, do you think the Australian film industry is on the improvement? It’s sort of been in the dumps the last few years.

Yeah, I think that there’s certainly an energy growing again and, you know, as more films get made the repertoire gets wider, the confidence grows. It takes a good film to suddenly kick everyone over again. But there’s no particular formula for success, it’s got to be a great script, and great writers working with fantastic directors and actors. It’s really hard to make a good film but there’s a fantastic field of talent around, and if it gets support we’ll be repaid handsomely.

Endnotes:

1. Bartleby: The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed, 2002,
http://www.bartleby.com/59/4/starcrossedl.html

2. Kate Holden, 2005: In My Skin: A Memoir, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia.

Candy is released on 3 November.

Phillip Cenere is completing a PhD at The University of Sydney and teaches television studies at The University of Wollongong.

Copyright Phillip Cenere 2006.