Hard Candy (2006)

Written by: Brian Nelson
Directed by: David Slade
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh^*

After three weeks of Instant Messenger chatting, 14 year old Hayley (Ellen Page) agrees to meet 32 year old Jeff (Patrick Wilson) face-to-face for the first time. She is smart and engaging beyond her years, but very clearly underage. He is a photographer who is a little too knowledgeable about the music she listens to and the authors she is reading and– despite his simultaneous protestations and flirtations– they end up at his hillside home/studio drinking screwdrivers and talking about his career photographing young (mostly underage) models.

Before long he will find himself wishing he had taken her advice to never accept a drink one didn’t mix themselves… and in a brief, blurry moment we see Hayley dancing on his couch in a skirt and bra before the movie changes into something else completely. You see, Hayley has an agenda of her own and it’s the kind of plan that years before she was born put the “fatal” in the title of the film Fatal Attraction.

Jeff is an unsavory character to be sure, but it’s hard to know just how much of the revenge Hayley seeks to dish out he really deserves. Patrick Wilson does a fantastic job with his role, the force of his acting serving to distract us from the more outlandish parts of the plot. The layers he has built up to disguise his feelings and desires from others– and perhaps from himself– are peeled away one after the other throughout the movie. And there is always something more to be discovered right up until the final few minutes of the film.

Ellen Page could be 14 or 18 or 25. She has the face of a teenager, still evolving into the woman we could predict her to be, and the self-righteousness to match… but she has the calculated rage and perception of someone much older. There are moments Hayley seems unreal and her emotions and actions wholly out of proportion to the situation, but isn’t that the way of the adolescent? At that age some people slam doors, punch friends, or etch themselves with razors. Others, apparently, tie up their pedophile predators, rifle through their house for incriminating evidence, and prep them for castration.

Interestingly, the usual justifications for older men trying to sleep with younger women are hardly alluded here. Hayley predicts many of them, giving them voice but rightly mocking them before they could escape Jeff’s lips even if he wanted to use them. But you don’t get the sense he wants to. There’s a single story of Jeff suffering an incident of childhood abuse, but it comes when he seems resigned to his suffering, almost as if he would be glad to be relieved of these feelings and desires he doesn’t understand or want. You can tell this isn’t a story Jeff has told anyone before– it might in fact be the first time he has reflected on it himself.

It’s hard to conceive of a “satisfying” resolution to a movie like this one; the end of the film will leave viewers with more questions than answers.

^*Given her star turn in Sideways and current role in the big hit Grey’s Anatomy, I’m not sure why Sandra Oh is in this movie at all. It can’t hurt to have her on the list of credits, but given her inconsequential 90 seconds or so of screen time, it’s kind of misleading to list her as if she actually had a substantial role.