Candy (2006)

Candy arrives from Australia in 2006, adapted from Luke Davies's novel, and concerns itself with two young people who fall in love and then fall into heroin. Heath Ledger plays Dan, a poet, and Abbie Cornish plays Candy, an art student. They marry, they steal, they sell what they can, they lose a child at twenty-three weeks, and they endure withdrawal in a house with bad plumbing. The film is arranged in three movements titled Heaven, Earth, and Hell, which is the sort of structural ambition that announces itself early and then does very little with the announcement.

For the purposes of classification, the picture is a clean slate. The cast is white and the film makes no argument about it. No character is gay. No character contends with racial politics. Nobody mentions the climate, and the economic misery on display is the private misery of addiction, not a thesis about capital. Candy's body is a site of damage and transaction, never of affirmation. Dan's collapse is a breakdown, not a diagnosis. There is no history here to revise, only a furnished flat, a pawn shop, and a professor with a habit.

What remains is a love story told with real conviction by its two leads, and a director, Neil Armfield, who trusts faces over speeches. The film never turns to the audience to explain what we ought to think, which in the present climate reads almost as an eccentricity. It drew mixed notices, a Golden Bear nomination, and a durable reputation as a respectable Australian tragedy. We can find nothing in it to score, and there is a certain relief in that. A film about two people destroying themselves for love asks nothing of us but attention. It gets some of it.