Hard Candy (2005)

 

Hard Candy (2005)

 

Revenge films are cathartic and, of course, that is the root of their Moral Depravity. We all want Revenge for something, we mostly don’t extract it, but we take real pleasure in Charles Bronson doing it for us in fiction (most famously as Paul Kersey in the “Deathwish” series (first movie 1974)). The fiction may likely devalue the Morality that restrains us, and though that devaluing might not turn us into Bernie Goetz, but it clearly inspired many to publicly support that freak, as well as supporting the even worse Kyle Rittenhouse, and those clowns who incompetently tried to execute a Traitorous coup on our Republic on January 6^th of this year.

 

But, on the other hand, the impulse for Revenge also reflects that there is so much Real-World Injustice is left unaddressed, and if an unaddressed Injustice doesn’t enrage you, do you have any Morality (depraved or otherwise) left at all, or are you merely a Robot?

 

The impulse for Revenge is our most degenerate Morality, but it is a Morality still.

 

Here we have an unusual Revenge film, because Writer Brian Nelson and Director David Slade have a certain knowingness – as males making a Crime/borderline Horror film, they know their largest audience will be male, but they made a film about female revenge on bad males. Wisely, they give us a handsome and appealing male Villain. As the film progresses, they keep encouraging the audience to holdout at least a little sympathy for the male Villain, while at the same time making him more and more loathsome with each successive scene. The goal is obvious, this is a Revenge that wants to make the male audience uncomfortable -- they really want to identify with the cruel Heroine, like they did with Charles Bronson so many decades ago, but the film-makers keep making them identify with the Villain, so watching him humiliated and tortured makes their flesh crawl.

 

Good for Nelson and Slade, because this movie is a Goddamned masterpiece.

 

The idea for “Hard Candy” came from a news story Producer David W. Higgins saw on TV’s “20/20” about young Japanese girls who would lured older businessmen to a location with the promise of, well, something, but instead swarm over the male, beat him, and rob him. Higgins thought, "What if the person you expect to be the predator is not who you expect it to be? What if it's the other person?" He brought this to Nelson and Slade.

 

Given the story’s obvious controversial nature, the budget was kept under $1 million so that the Production companies (Vulcan and Launchpad) would agree to minimal interference. Good choice, because this is a film of exceptional cruelty, and a gentler and juster resolution was possible, as we’ve seen this repeatedly on “Law and Order: SUV” (TV series first aired in 1999) but this film is purely about Depraved Moralities, and it really doesn’t want to hold back, not even in its last seconds.

 

There’s only a handful of settings, almost all indoors. Shot in only eighteen days, it has a cinema-verité dynamism, but technically more akin to a three-camera set-up of a TV show filmed before live before a studio audience, with long scenes were often done in single takes, and ultimately required very post-production dubbing. Though a few extra people make the cast-list, this is essentially a two-character drama, feeling like a filmed play, which is usually a criticism, but not so here. Both the leads are ferociously good, and the movie achieves an emotional intimacy that Crime films generally lack.

 

Our Villain is Jeff Kohlver, 35 -years-old, prowling the internet for underaged, but sexually curious girls (Patrick Wilson). He’s handsome, charming, and a successful photographer, so he’s got a lot of weapons at his disposal to become a very prolific Pedophile. Our Hero, or more accurately, Avenger, is Hayley Stark, 14-years-old, who at first seems to be falling under his spell, but soon proves to have been plotting against him even before they met (Ellen (more recently Elliot) Page, 17-years-old when the film was made, because having an actual 14-year-old in this part would be way-too-creepy).

 

They first meet at a coffee bar. Hayley is smart, articulate, and flirtatious. She’s got chocolate smeared on her lips and a crimson hoodie that evokes Little Red Riding Hood. She invites herself to his place almost as much as the Big Bad Wolf tempts her there. She is so engaging that he fails to recognize that she’s asking more questions than giving up answers. He plies her with alcohol. She responds, "I know better than to accept a drink mixed by a strange man." She doesn’t refuse though; she just makes sure she’s the one who mixes the drinks.

 

She drugged him. From one of the movie’s poster’s, "Red Hood traps the Wolf in his own game."

 

The editing is sometimes intrusive, especially in scenes of violence, potentially too intrusive, except that it helped the illusion of intense fights between a small girl and a man more than twice her size without either actor getting injured (Page had no stunt double, perhaps because there were no stuntpersons as small as her).

 

According to my reading, Hayley’s red hoodie, the film’s most obvious color-symbolism, was a happy accident. This film eschewed the language of obvious color symbolism for a color naturalism that was manipulated for the emotions of the moment. Though the film was shot much like a filmed play or three-camera TV-show, and very little of the dialogue needed post-production dubbing, the post-production was still an intense process of digital manipulation.

 

The film did a rare thing, the Digital Colorist, Jean-Clement Soret, was recognized in the opening credits. Extensive, laborious, and until just a few years ago impossible "density shifts" were created to emphasize the shifting emotions of the characters. Post-production lighting effects were intended to reflect the moods. These are extremely subtle, like the colors shifting to a lower frequency when Hayley gets angry, but Soret’s opening credits recognition indicates that Slade believed they were potent.

 

The lighting of the sets was unnaturally strong, then digitally darkened later, allowing for specific visual details, especially facial detail, to appear clearly even in an apparent darkened setting. These effects were more explicit in “The Others” (2001) but apparently the technology used here was even newer (it’s called Exposing to the Right (ETTR) and invented in 2003) and this is perhaps the first time ever used in cinema, allowing the same trick more subliminally.

 

What follows is both psychological and physical torture, including, among other things, the most protracted castration in cinema history, wholly un-graphic, which makes it that much worse to watch. Jeff begs, Hayley taunts him. Explaining how she learned how to perform a castration properly, she jokes, “Wow. I wonder why they teach Girl Scouts things like camping and selling cookies, you know? Because this is what’s really useful.”

 

It’s also an extraordinarily good demonstration of how an interrogation is supposed to be done, because Haley came in fully prepared, knows the answers to almost all her questions before asking, so when Jeff tries to lie, he’s transparent, and after each lie is exposed, it’s that much easier to extract the most demeaning truths from. Hayley is 100% better at her job than what we’ve seen in the news reports from the Abu Ghraib interrogations, so she has the same allure and Lex Luther (Comic Book Villain first appearing in 1940) and Doctor Doom (Comic Book Villain first appearing in 1962), and better still, she’s sort-of on our side (just like mass-murdering Charles Bronson/Paul Kersey was). Hayley also has a trump-card – as long as she never physically overpowered (which she almost is, more than once), Jeff has no power -- because he’s a Pedo, he can’t call the Cops to protect him from the 14-year-old girl.

 

If you have any soul at all, you know the post-9/11 Torture of Terror Suspects was wholly indefensible. A lot of the moral revulsion we eventually felt over this was because many of tortured were innocent, or at least less-guilty than first assumed. But many were guilty, and twenty-years later, our Military Tribunals are tied up in knots because much of the evidence against the obviously guilty was obtained through shockingly degenerate (and unreliable) methods. If we believe in a Justice System, then the Guilty should be protected as much as the Innocent from the overwhelemingly power of whomever holds them captive. Sometimes that’s hard to swallow Justice is for the Guilty too, but a Civilization is supposed to be, well, a Civilization.

 

But in this film, Jeff isn’t some Terrorist with a cause born of some carefully corrupted Morality, devastating Wars and extreme Depredation; Jeff’s a simple, slimy, Pedo, so with him, it’s even harder swallow he’s entitled to due-process than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

 

His torture might make us squirm, and Hayley is clearly a nut-job, but it’s still, so, immensely satisfying. Part of it (thinking back to Charles Bronson movies again) is that Jeff’s apparently beyond the Law, not a captive of the most powerful Nation in the World; we actually work hard to punish Terrorists in the Real-World, and that alone somewhat under-cuts the Depraved Morals of Torture-love, but regarding crimes that don’t receive the same Law Enforcement interest, well, as Haley points out, “Didn’t Roman Polanski just win an Oscar?”

 

The movie made me feel unclean, but in a good way. So, I guess, I’m not a good person.

 

Trailer:

Hard Candy (2005) Official Trailer #1 - Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page Movie HD - YouTube