***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison, Simon O’Connor, and Jed Brophy
Directed by Peter Jackson & written by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh
1994
108 min R
“If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” – From “Citizen Kane”
Thanks to “Lord of the Rings,” director Peter Jackson has become a household name, which is a rare thing for a movie director. It remains to be seen whether or not his subsequent films, including his forthcoming remake of “King Kong,” will be as spectacularly visual and spectacularly devoid of soul or humanity as the massive fantasy trilogy. But, with numerous awards and piles of money, he has the world’s stamp of approval for his endeavor. One wonders if he has the strength to bring personality and character back into his films, if he has the will to change his ways. Like poor Charlie Kane, he may simply be too rich and powerful to ever make anything truly meaningful again.
“Heavenly Creatures,” the story of an amazingly tender yet ultimately diseased friendship, is the second-to-last movie Jackson made before “Lord of the Rings,” and is his best and most mature. It achieves everything that massive trilogy failed to do, and contains all the spontaneity, quirkiness, humor, and subtexts, both macabre and universal, that are so abundant in his early films, and so sorely lacking in his giant moneymaker. Even Jackson’s bare bones undead comedy “Dead Alive” could be said to have more heart than “LOTR;” it may look like a low-budget gorefest, but it’s powered by a dread of the Oedipal complex, and the horror of being labeled a “mama’s boy” is much more terrifying than any zombie. “Heavenly Creatures” is also a genuinely touching and moving tragedy, which is more than can be said for—well, you get the idea.
It’s 1950s New Zealand and Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) is a squat, unattractive, and friendless fourteen-year-old. Like many teenagers she has made being ashamed of her boorish, working class family a full-time job. Along comes Juliet (Kate Winslet): rich, beautiful, spunky, and wise beyond her years. Her parents live on a grand estate; her father is scholarly and bookish while her mother is a sophisticated marriage counselor. Pauline sees Juliet as a medieval princess with movie star lighting. The two girls bond over their recalled childhood illnesses. Does Juliet want to comb other girls’ hair and gossip about boys? No, to Pauline’s amazement, she wants to talk about unicorns and knights and slaying dragons. She wants to invent fantastic worlds and give them centuries of royal lineage.
The two soon develop an intricate fantasy world of kings, heirs, and intrigues (both “Amelie” and “Thirteen” could be called “Heavenly Creatures’” direct descendents). It’s generic girl fantasy stuff, but because of the joy and freedom they find in it we spend much of the movie sharing their exhilaration. They make clay figurines of their vast cast of characters, and as the movie progresses an even vaster array of special effects brings their made-up world to life. The girls find themselves grinning amidst cottages and castles, surrounded by life-sized clay people willing to do their bidding. While “Lord of the Rings” takes fantasy at face value, “Heavenly Creatures” actually examines its appeal. In a grand sense, none of us lives in reality, only our own fantastic version of it. Juliet and Pauline suffer all the normal teenage problems—“I hate my mom,” “I wish I didn’t have to go to school,” “I have issues with organized religion,” etc.—and how their response differs from “healthy” teenagers is only a difference of degrees. Quite a lot of degrees, as we find out…
Juliet’s parents are not the superhumans Pauline believes they are and Juliet wants them to be. Mum’s (Diana Kent) sophisticated enough to eye other men and dad (Clive Merrison) is bookish to the point of impotence. But the girls prefer fantasy to reality. Their impregnable dyad, aided by the “novel” they always claim to be working on, leads to an active exclusion of real life. They start to see themselves as goddesses; there’s a certain age where you feel you’re either the most singular snowflake that ever fell or absolutely worthless, and the girls urge each other to bounce between those two extremes an awful lot.
Pauline is able to have an affair with her parents’ boarder because she imagines she is one character and he is another. Like many of Jackson’s actors, he gets his face rammed up to a wide-angle lens so that his artificially enlarged nose makes him into a kind of troll. She dumps him without a word and a second glance because she knows those two characters will still have their place in the book. Trouble really starts brewing when the two sets of parents begin to fear the relationship between the two girls has become too intense. Separating them falls mostly on the shoulders of Pauline’s mother (Sarah Pierse), who is not an educated or patient woman, but who loves her daughter and tries to do the best she can with her limited resources.
Page two of "Heavenly Creatures." Back to home.