There are many things to admire about this film - the extent of the effect of drug taking that the film goes into (like the miscarriage)- and Heath Ledgers performance; but there's a lot that just doesn't add up or go as well as it should have. Things that concerned me were: Abby Cornish gave a good performance but she spent almost the whole film looking like a gorgeous movie star, not a heroin addicted prostitute. People on heroin pay for it terribly in their physical and mental state and the physical side of it just wasn't captured properly in it. Where were the lesions, the weight loss, the teeth loss - the scabs? There was way too much "Portrait of the Drug Addicts as Beautiful Young Artistes" instead of lost disaffected drug addicted youth. ie too much celebrating their beauty and love rather than a more distanced objective framing of it - especially at the start of the film Ledger was charming and beautifully in the moment in his acting - but his charactersation was all over the place at times - from bumbling hopeless druggy to confident actor in a robbery to hard working brickies labourer -- all of these things are possible in the one character but we don't feel him grow and naturally change to them - it just felt like poor and jarring scripting and directing I felt the voice overs removed me from the action and a closeness to the characters and also created a few narrative jumps - I didn't feel like I was sitting as close to the characters on their journey as I felt I should have A few specific things - Dan's reaction to Candy first prostituting herself was neither one way or the other - something that strong required a strong reaction (after all we're continually told how much they love each other) - but if he wasn't too fussed about it - and if he's like that because of the drugs then we need to see that he is completely done over and desperate for the drugs, which he didn't seem When Candy sits up and tells the real estate agent 'we're drug addicts things are complicated' (or something like that) I didn't buy a word of it ~ she simply wasn't effected enough by her situation to make the words believable Rush was a bit stagey at times too It makes some good points and has some lovely acting in it at times - especially the last scene with Ledger and Cornish - but for me some of it jarred a bit - they just needed to put the boot in a bit more and stop celebrating them and start showing and feeling it more! Perhaps the degree to which they indulged or celebrated the characters prevented Armfield from looking in full detail at all of the scenes - for instance when Dan steals the wallet he doesn't know what the owner will look like - but when he first sees the drivers license and shows it to Rush and asks if he looks like him there's no sense of this being a new thought - it's as if he knows he can pull off the robbery by looking like him before he realises he looks like him! Some narrative advances appeared to come from the writer not the character - the way the robbery is pulled off is highly unrealistic (to the point of almost being comical for all the wrong reasons) - and you get the feeling it happened because the writer wanted him to have a lot of money not because it was a realistic situation faced by the character in his realistic world.
