Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 7-November-04
Spoiler Rating: High

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

I do not like ripped-from-the-headlines dramas about murder, scandal, and sex, especially when they involve children, and yet "Heavenly Creatures" is just such a tale and I think it's absolutely brilliant. In 1954, Pauline Parker, age 16, and Juliet Hulme, age 15, were convicted of murder and sentenced to prison in Christchurch, New Zealand. Their victim was Pauline's mother, whose head they bashed in with a brick. The clinching pieces of evidence at the trial were Pauline's diaries, in which she recorded her extremely close relationship with Juliet and described in detail how they plotted to get rid of her mother because she threatened to keep them apart. The passionate friendship of the murderers appears to have been the key to their appalling behavior (a condition of their release was that they never see each other again); at any rate, it serves as the focal point of this remarkable, one-of-a-kind film.

What sets the movie apart is "Lord of the Rings" maestro Peter Jackson, who takes what might have been a merely sordid tidbit from the annals of true crime and crafts it into a mesmerizing psychological fantasy. The story is told through the eyes of the young matricide Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a pudgy, Brillo-haired, scowling lass who keeps to herself until the arrival at school of the aristocratic Juliet (Kate Winslet in her debut). The girls hit it off immediately, fanning their mutual imagination to become roommates of castles in the air where Juliet can escape the pain of neglectful parents (Diana Kent, Clive Merrison) and Pauline can escape the bitterness of a working-class life. They invent new identities for each other with biographies free of inhibition and remorse, and let these identities inspire their everyday selves to rebellion. The bond this forges is visceral, spiritual, and often physical; they come to live solely for each other and the fantastic visions that they have nurtured in their conjoined consciousness.

Jackson takes the viewer deep into Pauline and Juliet's world, using excerpts from the fateful diaries to make the experience as vibrant as possible. (In one fabulous scene he recreates the girls' erotically charged obsession with Orson Welles in "The Third Man," recreating the climax of the classic film and weaving it into the fabric of his own.) This results in a unique take on a form of mental illness almost seductive in its rapture. Even though some of the passages from Pauline's diaries are chilling (she writes that the day before the murder felt like Christmas Eve), it wasn't until my second viewing that I realized how psychotic she must have been. Jackson portrays her separation from reality as a gilded madness, just one liberating step removed from normalcy.

Inevitably but too late do the girls' parents begin to question the intensity of their friendship, at which point the unfortunate victim (Sarah Peirse) makes herself unwanted by constant nagging and an overt fear of homosexuality. Not one to shy away from bloodshed, Jackson depicts the murder with a horrifying frankness that somehow maintains his spell of sympathetic fascination. As the dying woman watches her life drain away in the mud, Pauline and Juliet visualize their bond severing, their future together being torn apart at the seams. The end of the movie — like the beginning, like the middle — is unforgettable in its romantic interpretation of shocking delirium.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.