Hard Candy

Hard candy? Really hard!

The inspiration for Hard Candy was a wave of real-life attacks that took place in Japan. Producer David Higgins read about cases of schoolgirls ambushing real pedophiles to pay them their just desserts for predatory dating tactics.

Hard Candy starts out kind of slow, disarmingly so. Hayley (Ellen Page) and Jeff (Patrick Wilson) have been chatting over the Internet for some time. We meet them the day Hayley decides to hook up. Jeff is a 32-year-old photographer (of young girls, among other things). Hayley is—whoa, how lucky for Jeff?—a young girl.

I sensed the tension from the very beginning. Both have agendas about how this first meeting will go. Judging from the outcome of the story, the adult was more surprised! Jeff is a very charming and beguiling individual. Hayley is a way-too-smart and excessively-informed 14 years old. They should not be meeting. If either character lived in the real world and had his or her eye completely on the ball, the movie would have been over right then. We should be grateful to David Slade’s directing and Brian Wilson’s screenwriting that a deeper lesson is imminent. Moreover, the obvious does not happen.

As the day wears on, we witness one of the weirdest, scariest, and most sadistic but duly-earned encounters imaginable; and it’s credibly penned by Brian Wilson. The story delighted me. I know every movie needs to have a story line, but this is unusually powerful story-telling indeed.

Patrick Wilson should receive an Oscar nod for his role. His performance is arguably one of the best I’ve seen this year. I’m a generally pretty phlegmatic film viewer, but I really felt the pain Jeff was going through. He ached, both physically and emotionally. Actually, most of his pain was probably psychological. You see, Jeff has a secret.

This secret is going to demand a price. Enter a 90-pound 5-foot-tall conscience, Hayley Stark--aka thongrrrrl14. Hayley mercilessly torments, teases, tortures, and pretty much destroys Jeff’s ability to keep his secret to himself.

There are some implausibilities in this film. How can Hayley lift an unconscious 180-pound man onto a table top and tie him down there, with a seemingly endless supply of used nylon rope? How does Hayley know so much about Jeff and who he chats with? Why does Jeff chat on numerous different sites under the same alias? Why does Jeff use a date that almost anyone could figure out as the combination for his safe?

But I digress. This story is not about the implausibility of the situation. It is a story about the human condition. Its strength is the tension between Jeff’s desperate present and his so-far undisclosed past. What is important to note is this: Jeff is so distracted by his guilt that he is a willing accomplice to his own demise. He follows Hayley’s every suggestion. He could easily change his predicament but he has to protect his secrets. He fights to protect his past from exposure to the sacrifice of his own safety.

Jeff is a predatory stalker. Hayley is a vigilante. Both can be seen in symbolic terms: we are Jeff, Hayley is our conscience. You can never escape your conscience. It tracks you down, grabs you, and never gives you a moment’s peace. My Mom used to always say, “Your sins will find you out.� She was right of course. She always found out. Later in life I figured out she had the help of a nosey neighbor lady. (Our own Holy Spirit in the flesh lived in our neighborhood.) How else could she have found out what I was doing in secret? On the other hand, my mom was actually right about the evil I did: it followed me around and would not relent. There was no escaping what I had done, despite my best efforts to ignore or otherwise shed my guilt for whatever mischief I had committed.

Anyway, Jeff is a pedophile. Hayley knows it and is self-appointed to make sure Jeff does not perpetrate again. She represents the pressure of hidden sin, after too much suppression. I’ve carried much hidden sin and it is not pleasant. It began to consume me. Jeff has his sin locked away in a safe, but it still haunts him. The fact that Jeff doesn’t try to escape is perhaps the most compelling piece of the film. If he were innocent, he could simply go away or call the police to rescue him and have Hayley put in juvie. But, discovery is his real nemesis. That simply cannot happen. Jeff has no interest in changing his ways. He fights hard to protect his secrets. Hayley is making him face them. He is shamed by his past. The girl he still longs for can never find out and he takes great pains to be certain she does not.

This story could be about any one of us. Hayley could be inside anyone’s head. Though I could never commit the atrocities of child molestation, I am still no better than a pedophile because of my own “dirt.� Hard Candy makes such a good photoplay of how disgusting our sin is. What is missing, of course, is the forgiveness that we can all have. We don’t have to be consumed by sin. As bad as Jeff’s life has been, he could still find forgiveness in Christ.

There is such value in a story like this. You see, we all need to come clean with what we do. Fortunately, I have a supportive group of loving friends and family that I can go to if I need to discuss my “stuff.� Jeff doesn’t have that, of course. An appropriate image comes from Psalm 32:3-4.

When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day
long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained
away as with the fever heat of summer.