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Product Description
Dan a charming but reckless young poet falls in love with candy a beautiful young student who is attracted to his bohemian lifestyle. In order to get closer to dan candy joins him in his drug addiction. Hooked as much on heroin as one another their story becomes an intense love triangle - a boy a girl & a drug. Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 03/27/2007 Starring: Heath Ledger Abbie Cornish Run time: 108 minutes Rating: R

Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Splendor in the Grass... with drugs. May 6, 2007
16 out of 25 found this review helpful

This is one of those cult movies in the making, like Code 46, that I saw in the theater with only a couple of people present -- but everyone there sat almost religiously through the closing credits and walked out as if transformed.

Though the movie takes place in Australia, Dan, played by Heath Ledger in what is surely the most invested performance of his career so far, comes off as the epitome of the Southern poet, the Faulkner archetype. But like so much in this movie, including the drug theme, Dan's poetic side is really a red herring. Poetry AND addiction AND love all amount to the same thing for Dan -- a repressed or perhaps even unconscious yearning for heaven, three ways to fill the void of a world that has become irreligious and material to the core. Drugs in this movie are only a metaphor for addictions of all kinds, including male-female love, while spiritual transcendence must be and is an untethering from this world. The tension of the film is; will Dan succumb to his lower impulses, or higher spirit?

What makes this, to me, one of the greatest and truest of all love stories is that director Neil Armfield respects Dan and Candy's love for the purity of intent behind it, while at the same time acknowledging that it must be shattered for each to become individuals. There's another layer to this movie, an acknowledgement that we are entering a post-Christian, indeed hellish civilization. The characters who are doing drugs in this film are not out for a good time; they are trying to escape a bleak future, to put themselves to sleep. In the most memorable scene of the movie -- SPOILER HERE -- Dan's dealer and hopelessly inept father-figure Geoffrey Rush fades away while one of his boy-toys occupies himself with a monstrous video game, blasting away at Iraqis. Though suicide is not the answer, Armfield is right to pay respect to those who are suffering from the ant-like behavior that Darwin's children have embraced.

This movie, in fact, could even be seen as the Christian riposte to the condescending, mean-spirited Jewish view of the "goyim" and their self-destruction, Requiem for a Dream. What makes it special is precisely this hidden Christian quality, a detached but sympathetic view of the ways that, having forgotten Christ's promise of salvation after death, we try to reproduce heaven on earth -- art, sex, heroin -- and achieve only hell. But sometimes miracles happen, and Dan is a miraculous character.
When you see what happens to him at the end, you will look at everyone differently, every gardener, every fry-cook, every crossing guard, and wonder if they too have Candy in their past... And are waiting for her in their future.

3 out of 5 stars

Scenes are compelling on their own, but the film as a whole is severely lacking April 22, 2007
15 out of 25 found this review helpful

Is Candy a love story or a drug story? A love story about the love of drugs? The movie is unflinchingly honest look at a couple addicted to heroin. The pair is played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish (neither with a terribly good complexion due to their drug use). As a whole, the movie is a montage of rather cliched scenes of drug abuse. You get the bad -- the crippling agony of going cold turkey, the violent rages when demanding a fix, a miscarriage and emotional pain on top of withdrawal, and so on. There are also the rare moments of beauty, of the enjoyment of life driving in the sunlight with the top down. The scenes are rounded out with the pure strangeness of drug havens, such as the juxtaposition of Geoffrey Rush playing Microsoft Flight Simulator while a tan cabana boy in an orange Speedo lounges in the background.

Individual scenes are compelling, moving, and shocking, but as a whole, the film doesn't leave an impression. This is a repackaging of vignettes that have been told before (and in much better films, like Requiem for a Dream, or, on the lighter side, Spun). Everything in Candy has been done before, and in better quality works. This is not to say that the acting isn't first rate, or that there aren't amazing scenes. but Candy as a whole is just not a memorable film.

My cynical side wonders if the director believed that "gorgeous people ruined by drugs!!!" was enough of a premise for a movie, and focused merely on scandalous scenes of drug use, rather than the film as a whole. I'm a junkie for movies about addiction and psychological pain, so I had to watch this one, but it isn't one I'll be recommending to friends.

4 out of 5 stars

Difficult to watch March 28, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

The reason I say it was difficult to watch is because of the subject matter. I find it incredibly hard to see people so hooked on drugs that they sell themselves on the street. I wish they had given a little background about the characters. Was Dan always a no good lout, or did his addiction bring this out in him? What did these two people see in each other aside from the physical and the fact that they were both hooked on heroin. How did they meet? You are dropped right in the middle of the relationship and they are already junkies. I gave it four stars because in spite of this flaw, it was still a good movie, with great performances by the three lead actors. Heath Ledger as Dan leaves behind his pretty boy image. Abbie Cornish is spectacular as Candy, and Geoffroy Rush is their mentor/friend who supplies them with drugs, and he gives a wonderful performance, as always. He is also a college professor, who eventually dies of an overdose. The final scene in the movie is quite moving. "Spoilers* When Candy is released from the hospital after suffering a breakdown, she visits Dan at his job, where he is a dishwasher. (Well, at least he has a job now, and he's drug free) You can see that they still love each other, but Dan turns her away probably because he knows that if they get back together, they will get back on the drugs. Its what their whole relationship was based on. They have no other way of relating to each other. Also, Candy had miscarried their child, and I think there were just too many bad memories for their marriage to survive. Heath Ledger blew me away in the scenes where he held their still born baby, and when he cried at the end because he knew he had to let Candy go. So, so sad.

5 out of 5 stars

A Poignant Little Drug Drama April 3, 2007
11 out of 13 found this review helpful

"Candy" is a poignant little drama dealing with both drugs and a relationship, and more specifically the drugs that affect that relationship.

Heath Ledger gives one of his best performances as Dan, a heroin addict who meets Candy (Abbie Cornish), at first a young innocent girl. Immediately, Dan and Candy become inseparable wanting to do everything together. Pretty soon, Candy is also a heroin addict and the couple are scrambling to get money to feed their habit...Meanwhile, there is their friend Casper (Geoffrey Rush, who gives Oscar-worthy supporting work) who both encourages them to quit, but supplies them when they need any.

Now, I've seen a lot of drug movies, great ones (Requiem for a Dream, Spun, A Scanner Darkly, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Jesus' Son, etc.); But never until this one have I seen a drug movie that could actually convince people to stop doing drugs or to never do them at all. The filmmakers went incredibly realistic for their portrayal of drug use and how it affects people and many of the scenes were painful to watch. The withdrawal scene in particular is agonizing, as is the following "labor" scene...All the performances in this film are incredible; Especially Ledger, Rush, and Cornish. The script, based on a novel by Luke Davies, doesn't go for all the cliches that have made up many other movies before it. "Candy" is a movie that had it not been such a small production, it could've scored some Oscar nominations...This is a great little film and I highly recommend that if you're reading this you see it.

GRADE: A

4 out of 5 stars

White Candy February 21, 2008
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Back in 2002 I went through a phase in which I wanted to read novels concerning heroin addiction. I read Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue, William S. Burroughs' Junky and Queer, and Hunter S. Thompson's, more about excessive drug use than heroin addiction, one after the other. I am not quite sure how I came across Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction, but its green cover depicting nothing more than a couple of rusted spoons fascinated me and I purchased the novel and read it over a couple of days. I must say while the book was not quite as well written as some of the previous books that I have mentioned, Candy had some of the most grueling and wretched chapters that I have ever read concerning both withdrawal and filth that total addiction can become. (There was a scene in the book when the narrator had to pull out crabs from one of Candy's most private areas in the novel which, of course, did not make it into the film) Sow when I heard that Candy had been made into a film I was on it like white on rice.

Candy opens with Dan, Heath Ledger, a friend, and his girlfriend Candy getting ready to take some heroin. Dan chops up the dope finely with a razorblade for the girl to snort, but she tells him that she wants to do it his way by injection. Unfortunately after her first time taking heroin this way, Candy nearly dies, but is saved by Dan when he injects her with salt water. This brief scene foreshadows the downfall the couple will face, but their strong bond of love, as well as addiction carries them on and they eventually marry much to the discontent of Candy's white bread family. After their marriage, and as their addiction grows, the young couple begin to steal more and Candy becomes a prostitute to support their habit. When will it end?

Candy is a slow, meditative film on the horrors of addiction and how said addiction can not only destroy oneself, but those around one as well and while it might not be quite as hard hitting as the novel, it is still an example of some quite good filmmaking.

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