01.27.08
Hard Candy
A word of advice for any dude who is thinking about watching Hard Candy, do yourself a favor and don’t eat beforehand.
In Hard Candy, this photographer, Jeff (hot hot in glasses Patrick Wilson) chats up a 14 year old girl Hayley (everyone’s favorite impregnanted precocious teen, Ellen Page at her pixiest) online. They meet for coffee, she convinces him to take her back to his house where she proceeds to drug and fuck with him for the majority of the movie. She does some seriously depraved shit.
It’s really well directed, really well acted and the definition of provocative. Basically Hayley is convinced that Jeff is a molester and deserves everything she does to him so I kind of sat there (as I know I was supposed to) the whole time thinking “Jesus, does *anyone* deserve this kind of shit?” But it’s the moments of tension and the bright and blurry production design that really stood out to me. When Hayley gives Jeff a semblance of a chance to escape, his panic is so palpable, not only because of Patrick Wilson (can I reiterate how hot he is even as a child molester? Hot!) but also because of the way the camera pans frantically around his ultramodern neatly decorated house with red and yellow contrastingly saturated walls and the hot and cool color filters. I also think it’s a mark of a well-directed movie when you can feel that kind of tension without the benefit of heavyhanded scoring. I totally hate overscoring, but there really isn’t much to be found here, so that’s just great!
The Hayley character is a little over the top in her sadism, but Page makes it work because the contrast between how she looks and how she acts. Her cutesy pixie hair and freckles somehow temper the fact that she sprays bleach in Jeff’s mouth and keeps you from condemning her…Wilson really looks his part, too. He is attractive (Hayley points out that he “doesn’t look like someone who has to meet girls online”) but a little balding and his insecurity shows in how he carries himself, even before he gets tied to a chair by a 14 year old girl. Sandra Oh also has a brief cameo as a suspicious neighbor and even she seems right for her part - buttoned up with pearls as the mom of a Girl Scout who solicits Hayley as a babysitter.
So yeah, Hard Candy is really well done, pretty fucked up and generally [insert word that means entertaining but doesn’t imply that I like watching people be tortured].