Beyond the Multiplex

"Candy": A guy, a girl, a surrogate father and heroin: A love story
I don't suppose there's a more oft-told tale in so-called serious film, after the '60s, than the Drugs Are Bad saga. (Well, maybe there is, and it's the Love Is Bad saga. We'll get to that shortly.) Sheer familiarity may dull the impact of "Candy," Australian director Neil Armfield's debut feature, for most viewers over 17. But with its intelligence, compassion, human terror and sheer loveliness, "Candy" is a winner despite the well-worn path it treads.

"Candy" was adapted by Armfield and writer Luke Davies from the latter's novel, an Aussie bestseller in the "Million Little Pieces" vein (except acknowledged as fiction). However much this story reflects personal experience, anyone who's been unfortunate enough to know junkies personally -- or, still more stupidly, to live among them -- will recognize the characters in "Candy." Dan (Heath Ledger) and Candy (the luminous Abbie Cornish) are not bedraggled, nihilistic deadbeats, or at least don't see themselves that way. They're sybarites, perennial optimists, living by the pleasure principle. They're young, sexy and in love. They don't realize they've descended to the level of pond scum until the end of their story, if even then.

Acting with his own accent for the first time since he became a movie star, Ledger is something of a revelation in this role. Of course he's a handsome devil, but Dan -- a bedraggled poseur-poet, suburban refugee type -- has a loosey-goosey charm, a sort of deranged reasonableness, I've never seen in Ledger's characters before. He plays Dan as a cute little boy, even when he's explaining to Candy that she's got to be the one who turns tricks to keep their habit going. "You're heterosexual, you're just doing what you're good at," he says, clutching a pillow. "I'd be hopeless at all that gay stuff." (Yes, I know, "Brokeback Mountain," ha ha.)

Still, it's Cornish -- an Australian TV star who's still little-known elsewhere -- who might be the breakout star here. Candy, a wannabe painter from a stolid middle-class family, never stops being lovely as she descends through the stages of Davies' Dante-esque narrative (the film's sections are actually called "Heaven," "Earth" and "Hell"). Her decline into smack-whore depravity and madness is subtly handled, and relative rather than absolute. You may have seen this kind of drug-using couple: One can handle it, sort of, remaining marginally functional and perhaps able to pull out of the death spiral before it's too late; the other one snaps the tether before anyone realizes it.

Dan and Candy are aided and abetted by their surrogate dad, a dissolute gay chemistry professor named Casper, marvelously played by Geoffrey Rush. This is another figure from the drug world, the wannabe-Burroughs elder who has devised a survival strategy of sorts but drags others down in his charismatic wake. A couple of Australia's strongest character actors, Tony Martin and Noni Hazlehurst, do noble work as Candy's heartbroken parents.

Armfield has been a theater director in Sydney (and many other places around the world) for years, and his transition to the screen is accomplished here with cleanliness and grace. He understands that he's got a terrific cast and a powerful, even archetypal, story of love and decay, and he doesn't try to gussy "Candy" up with trippy, drug-movie clichés. If this film lacks the iconic, culty verve of a "Trainspotting" or a "Midnight Cowboy," it is nonetheless a vivid, lyrical and fully convincing fable of innocence lost, or, if you prefer, willfully thrown away.

"Candy" opens Nov. 17 at the Angelika Film Center in New York, and Dec. 1 in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, with many more cities to follow.

Next page: A great marriage movie; a reissue of a Godard classic