Trevor J. Tremaine: Hard Candy--One Tough Nut

(Trevor did a good job of contextualizing his response, notice how it adds legitimacy and authority to his argument. Since I thought some might not know all of his references, I provided some handy links to provide more background)

Hard Candy: One Tough Nut



Horror films of the last few decades have served, at their base levels, as fundamentalist morality tales. The original grindhouse films of the late seventies (the more mainstream, and therefore more notorious, examples of which include Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and Meir Zarchi’s oft-maligned I Spit on Your Grave) subjected sociopaths to unanticipated reprisals either by or on behalf of their victims, which often failed to match the atrocities the victims themselves endured (but what the hell, the picture needs an ending, might as well make it a good one). The slasher franchises of the eighties upped the ante by removing the more blatantly criminal aspects of its blade-fodder, and condemned lustful, clueless teens to the wrath of an invincible, omniscient killing machine (often conceived as having some past trauma that vaguely justified his/her/its actions) for the perceived crime of youthful hedonism. Then there was the procession of savvy serial-killer films in the nineties, which sophisticated our “antagonist,” furnishing him with charm, wit, and a sympathetic mission (i.e. Hannibal Lecter, in some respects, or more precisely, John Doe of Fincher’s Se7en). The turn of the millennium finds us revisiting the heyday of the grindhouse with a distinctly ironic spin that incorporates themes and ideals from all subgenres of contemporary horror, replete with tawdry moralizing: the Saw franchise entitles a dying man to dispatch those whom he deems to be “taking life for granted” in increasingly creative ways, while Eli Roth’s Tarantino-approved Hostel exploits the bodies of those who revel in the exploitation of others’ bodies. The connection is not hard to make, especially among the most recent lot.

But let’s cut the shit. This isn’t Sunday school. These films need to sell tickets. All the preaching is a subtext for what audiences really want: Blood. Gore. Death. Torture. That last one is what’s really doing it for the fans, nowadays. Hell, it’s worse than the ones before it. And screenwriters are market-driven to develop more deviously disturbing methods by which to realize it.

Though short on physical violence, and nearly devoid of blood or gore, David Slade’s controversial thriller Hard Candy has been accepted by the torture-happy horror crowd to which it was (surreptitiously) pitched. There is a righteous oppressor. There is a bound and guilty victim. And naturally, the punishment fits the crime.

However, the angle here is a little different: the antagonist, suave, metropolitan thirty-something fashion photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson), is bestowed with an unforgivable vice: little girls. His accuser, boyish, barely-pubescent (I’m loathe to resort to calling her a “pixie” as many reviewers unfortunately did) “Hayley” (Ellen Page) fancies herself a vigilante. There is a brief set-up (via the apocryphal Internet chat room). And what follows is approximately an hour and a half of retribution.

And perhaps this speaks to my own shallowness, but I wouldn’t really have a problem with this film if it sought simply to be tense and disturbing; if, like its Exploitation and Neo-Exploitation predecessors, the ethics and values used as initial justification for the ensuing mayhem were tidily discarded once said mayhem ensued. But as the cast consists of only Wilson and Page for nearly the whole of the film’s running time, one anticipates a fair amount of loaded dialogue.

This also wouldn’t be an issue if the dialogue didn’t become increasingly didactic and self-aggrandizing as the film progresses, to the point where Hayley answers her victim’s plea of “who are you?” with a laughably clichéd standard-form PSA spiel, something along the lines of, “I’m every girl you touched, abused, hurt…” etc., etc.

The hokey, simplistic sermons are further compounded by the puzzling character depictions. To echo the sentiment of another viewer, the film actually makes you sympathize with a child molester over a teenage girl! Hayley’s redundant tirades and the ambiguous nature of her charges against Jeff are somewhat at odds with her cruelty. At first, I assumed that this was intentional, and was what had earned the film its considerable controversy. Yes, Hard Candy was going to scrutinize the true nature of pedophilia and the public hysteria surrounding it.

But the film goes out of his way to make Jeff a “bad guy.” Hayley allows him (with every intention) numerous opportunities to escape and “do the right thing”… call the cops, turn himself in, put an end to her sadism. And of course he doesn’t. Instead, he stalks her with a gun at one point, a knife at another, and sets himself up for another ensnarement, and further punishment (screenwriter Brian Nelson bludgeons the viewer with this revelation of character, via another of his protagonist’s screeds). By the time that Jeff is exposed as having been indeed involved in the rape and murder of a friend of Hayley, it is too late in the film, and too tactless, to attain its intended impact.

Make no mistake: Jeff is sleazy. He’s an unrepentant deviant who harbors more personal darkness than the film lets on. But Slade’s unflinching long takes in searing high-contrast focus on Jeff’s frailty (plenty of pleading and screaming as Hayley fakes an impromptu castration on his kitchen counter), while simultaneously empowering the sadistic automaton that will prove his undoing (for example, Hayley’s dismissal of Jeff’s own account of childhood trauma feels like a conservative power fantasy, a slap to the face of bleeding heart apologists). It is a thematic dissonance that dominates the film, but is not actually acknowledged in the narrative, making it seem that Slade, Nelson, and their cast weren’t exactly on the same page, so to speak.

I certainly don’t fault the actors: their roles are demanding, physically and emotionally, and their performances (particularly relative newcomer Page) should be powerful. And Slade’s direction is suitably sparse, although the aforementioned color palette often made me wonder why the ground would be covered in snow (it was actually a parking lot) in what looks like Southern California; nevertheless, Slade does wonders with the sparse set, at one point deftly transforming a kitchen into an operating room. His camera makes the viewer the victim, with exhaustive static shots and disorienting, but not gratuitous, Steadicam work.

I believe the story itself is innately flawed.

Hard Candy invokes many serious, ubiquitous modern issues: pedophilia (the modern predator, like the Satanists, high school shooters, and communists of past decades, worthy of contempt, fear, and analysis), vigilantism (private citizens, motivated by racism and jingoism, taking up arms and patrolling the Mexican border for fence-jumpers), and torture (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, et al.); yet, at the film’s close, we don’t feel that any of these issues have been adequately addressed. In the end, I suppose the controversy of the film is attributable to the same factors by which the bland fruit of contemporary horror’s “Splat Pack” are judged. It is not a genre revision like Takashi Miike’s boundary-pushing Audition, the horrific denouement of which is more effective than a bowl of Hard Candy (and whose criticism of sexual objectification is not undermined by its graphic violence, though is arguably at odds with the apparent misogyny of the director’s other work). Nor does it dare to engage its audience in self-reflection like Michael Haneke’s timely treatise on voyeurism Funny Games, an artistic direction that would’ve appropriately earned Slade the superlative of “courageous” some critics were quick to charge, and may have resulted in an interesting exploration of revenge and intrinsic evil. Instead, we are left with exploitation masquerading as investigation. Viewers interested in this approach would be more satisfactorily served by Dateline NBC’s weekly dose of “To Catch a Predator.”