Deviant Streaks
'Hard Candy' plays with revenge, while 'Bettie' celebrates pinup's history
By Andy Klein
According to the MPAA's website, the new thriller Hard Candy is "rated R for disturbing violent and aberrant sexual content involving a teen, and for language." I've never quite understood how what the MPAA calls "language" really belongs in the equation, but on the whole this characterization seems fair enough. Hard Candy repeatedly refers to - though doesn't actually contain scenes of - pedophilia, and it includes scenes of violence that, while not precisely sexual, have enough of a sexual connection as to be even more disturbing than your garden-variety shoot-'em-up blood-spilling.
The hook has its roots in those obsessed-stalker/kidnapper thrillers that proliferated in the '60s, The Collector being the best known. Most, though not all, of these involved guys abducting women; Hard Candy takes the path less traveled, with a woman nabbing a man. Or maybe we should say "girl" rather than "woman," since the distinction - while not universally agreed upon - is crucial herein.
Jeff (Patrick Wilson) is a 32-year-old professional photographer, who trolls Internet chat rooms, interacting with teenage girls. While this seems creepy from the getgo, Jeff claims not to be interested in anything ugly or illegal, but merely in finding models.
He makes a date to meet his latest collocutor - Hayley (Ellen Page), whom he knows to be 14 - at a local coffee shop. There are probably conceivable contexts in which this wouldn't seem, at a minimum, unsavory, but this isn't one of them. No matter how many times Jeff claims that he wouldn't lay a hand on Hayley until she's 18 - not an uncreepy concept in itself - he's still a guy in his 30s having a clearly flirtatious rendezvous with a girl so young that "informed mutual consent" is not a real possibility.
On top of that, he proceeds to take her to his isolated home studio and give her an alcoholic drink. Despite her tender age, she tosses it and mixes her own, saying, "Never drink anything you didn't mix yourself." This turns out to be advice that Jeff would have been wise to observe as well, since the drink Hayley proceeds to hand him turns out to be drugged, and, next thing Jeff knows, he's bound and totally at her mercy.
Director David Slade and writer Brian Nelson play an interesting game with our sympathies here. We have been primed to worry about the naive girl at the mercy of the clearly icky older guy, but suddenly we find ourselves worried about the icky older guy being at the mercy of a canny, quite possibly insane, teenager. We haven't seen Jeff actually doing anything more exploitative than providing a minor with booze. His declarations of innocence vis-à-vis actual physical acts may not be very convincing, but they're not impossible; and Hayley's new role as vigilante judge, jury, and possibly even executioner seems morally insupportable, possible pedophile or not.
When it comes to language, the MPAA's objections are undoubtedly to words like "fuck" - which probably is heard in Hard Candy, though to be honest, I wasn't precisely keeping track of that one or of terms with the same level of forbidden intensity, like "cock" and "cunt." (Does anybody really care about such words anymore?) Indeed, the c-word we hear most often in the film is "castration," and it's more than likely to give a lot of viewers - particularly male viewers - the, well, willies ... very chilly willies. (I was going to say "audience members," but that would only confuse the syntax further.)
In fact, the filmmakers know the power of words and manage to stir up a sense of violence and suspense on a level with films like Saw entirely through the audience's imagination. That is, there is almost no blood seen on screen and no extreme violence; and it's unclear that the effect would be as horrifying if there had been. Hayley is smart enough to know that a quick slice-and-excise job is not nearly adequate punishment for what she believes Jeff has done. She revels in dragging things out, cruelly toying with him ... and, by extension, with the audience.
As should be clear, Hard Candy is an ugly film, which is not precisely meant as an aesthetic or even a moral judgment. Saw, Se7en, A Clockwork Orange, and Takashi Miike's Audition are deeply ugly films as well, and not all of them are indefensible or exploitative tripe.
In one sense, Slade and Nelson paint themselves into a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't corner. They very cleverly set it up so that things will work themselves out in a morally satisfying way. I appreciate that, but the characters are more interesting before everything gets so neatly tied up at the end. The restoration of a clearcut white hat/black hat dichotomy deflates everything that made things intriguing along the way.
In terms of sheer low-budget ingenuity, the production deserves praise. There are essentially two characters and one location, no special effects, not even the hassle of night shooting. Slade, Nelson, and company have wrung maximum effect from minimal resources through writing, acting, and directing. Both Page (who was 17 during shooting, even while looking substantially younger) and Wilson give compelling performances.
Pedophilia rears its ugly head in The Notorious Bettie Page as well, though much more briefly and subtly. (We get only intimations of Page's violation by her father.) Mary Harron, whose previous credits include the biopic I Shot Andy Warhol, returns to the genre with this swift, thoughtful survey of the life of the most famous "racy" pinup girl of the '50s.
Following an unhappy childhood and a failed marriage, Page left Tennessee for New York, where she took acting classes and posed for bathing-suit shots that eventually incorporated nudity and then bondage and other fetishes. In the lead, Gretchen Mol effectively conveys the combination of fresh-faced sweetness and "naughtiness" that made Page a star. And, filming primarily in black and white, Harron re-creates a '50s that is compatible with my (admittedly faint) memories of the period, despite what seem to be occasional anachronisms. (Just what year was that snazzy convertible in Bunny Yeager's driveway?)
Harron not only seems to follow Page's own recounting of her life fairly faithfully, but the film itself also exhibits the same generous, accepting attitude that was one of Page's great appeals. That is, she seemed unashamed of posing nude, even while remaining in many ways the all-American girl from a small Tennessee town. And The Notorious Bettie Page rigorously resists cheap shots and easy mockery. (Think of how Hal Ashby might have handled the same material.)
The most obvious issue is Page's born-again return to Christianity, which is presented in a dignified, matter-of-fact way. But perhaps even more surprising is the scene in which a man tells a Senate committee that Bettie's bondage photos are somehow responsible for his son's death. The man's claims come across as utterly unfounded, a classic example of a parent looking to lay off his own unbearable guilt or responsibility onto a scapegoat. Yet the scene is presented with absolute sincerity; and it's impossible not to be moved, no matter how unconvincing his logic may be.
Published: 04/13/2006
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