My 100 Favorite Films of All Time #88: Hard Candy

How many good movies are out there that center around pedophiles … besides Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?  Few.  It is difficult to make a good movie about a pedophile because the subject matter is so loaded.  What if you make a movie about a pedophile who sets up an encounter with a teen girl in order to have sex with her, but she isn’t what he expected?  What if she, Ellen Page in this case, turns out to be the predator … and she’s really good at it?  Can you make a good movie about a pedophile then?  Yes.

Hard Candy is such a fun film to watch.  It turns viewers’ expectations on their head as it presents a pedophile (or at very least an ephebophiliac, though an assertion is made that he may be a pedophile, so I will stick with that) as someone you may actually have some (but very little) sympathy for as he is seemingly tortured.  That’s a real fine balancing act to pull off effectively.  Too far in one direction and you have what lazy critics call “torture porn.”  Too far in the other direction and you have a creepy movie about a sympathetic pedophile.  Director David Slade and writer Brian Nelson walk that high wire the entire running length.  They understand the danger they have placed the plot in, and they give the audience credit for being intelligent enough to see what they are doing.  In that sense, Hard Candy becomes an act of trust between the filmmakers and audience, while the entire film itself is based around lies (a pedophile who lies to lure a teenage girl to his home, and a teenage girl who pretends to be a victim).  Once you start delving into the implications presented in the picture it is hard to dismiss it as a mere thriller.

I have heard it asked how such a young girl (she is 14 in the film) can outwit a grown man who has obviously partaken in such acts before.  There are, of course, a thousand different answers that can be given, but I think one that hasn’t been discussed much is that even as teenagers, girls are very aware of their sexuality, even moreso than boys, who are controlled by their own sexual urges and have little in the way of understanding them.  Girls realize the control their sexuality has over others.  Really intelligent girls know how to use this to their full advantage, and men often underestimate this skill despite the fact that they curse it so much instead of respecting it.  When it comes to sex, few men ever make it out of their teenage years, while teenage girls are forced to grow up faster.  They know what those leers mean and those “accidental” touches indicate.  That is how Page’s character pulled it off.  She knew what drove men … especially men turned on by teenage girls.  Watch any episode of To Catch a Predator, which is really nothing more than pedophilia you can feel good about, and you will see the same ideas in action.  Men will travel hours, ignoring every sign that says he is about to be entrapped, simply because of the promise of a sexual encounter with a girl.  Most men are controlled by sex plain and simple.

Hard Candy is not a disturbing film.  In fact, it is quite tame.  (And, let’s be honest, the writer and director could have made this even more of moral swamp to drown in, but decided to let the audience off easy.)  Almost all of the damage done to the pedophile, played well by Patrick Wilson, is psychological … until the end at least.  If it were remade today, one has no doubt that would be remedied … and the film would then fall off that high wire I mentioned earlier.  As it stands, it is a subtle and smart commentary on the notion of victims, predators and prey, and what it means to be any of those things.

Mandatory FTC Disclaimer: I did not receive this film to review.  Clicking on a link may earn me a commission. 

The Woman

The Woman is getting some strong press out of Sundance and causing some equally strong reactions from its audience.  Hype?  Maybe.  Worth checking out?  I will be.  That's not issue, though.  What I do find interesting is that people are saying it degrades women (I haven't seen it, but I have faith in Lucky McKee (who directed) and Jack Ketchum (who wrote the book it is based on) to make sure that it is far beyond a mere piece of degradation.  Yes, the idea of a feral woman held captive by a family with a twisted patriarch who puts her through all kinds of abuse does cause one to take a few steps back, but degradation?  No, I'll leave that to Jersey Shore.

This also leaves an unasked, but equally important question: What's wrong with degradation?  Men have been degraded in film, but we usually look at that as though they had that coming to them.  (Think Hard Candy, which was an excellent movie.  Maybe he had some of that coming, but I urge you to rewatch it.  Did it have to go that far?  Was it warranted?)  Hostel is another one.  Why shouldn't there be some equality?  Playing devil's advocate here is easy: violence happens in real life more to women than men, so it shouldn't be seen on screen.  I don't agree with that, as in art anything goes, but I do think this leads to why we have such a visceral reaction to it on screen.

Violence against men in cinema is often justified, acceptable and sometimes even funny.  When it is done against women, however, we tend to extend our sympathies and get enraged (watch the footage of the man escorted out of a showing of The Woman to see that in full effect).  Because we often see them as victims in real life, we can more easily relate to them as victims on screen.  It makes the story more compelling, and that is something art should strive for.  (By comparison, Haute Tension takes its female lead and makes her a hero that goes through some pretty rough stuff and eventually makes her a nasty villain, but the audience can forgive all that because she is ape shit crazy.  If that had been a male in the lead role, the audience would have wanted him to suffer at the end.)

I'm sure The Woman is not meant to be a study of degradation, but that of power.  Who really has power in a realtionship?  How far can you push things before they push back?  Is violence justified in confronting violence?  Important questions, and from the reviews I've read, this film investigates them.  Yeah, it could have been a male that was captured and abused, but let's face it -- would you want to see that and, more importantly, would this even be an issue?  Hardly.  It wouldn't even be a blip on the radar.

So, who's the real sexist here?