HEAVENLY CREATURES
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Clive Merrison, Diana Kent. Screenplay: George Welsh and Peter Jackson. Director: Peter Jackson.
Earlier this year, I commented on thematically similar films where the later release suffered in comparison to the first. WYATT EARP languished in the wake of the less reverent but far more entertaining TOMBSTONE; BLOWN AWAY was blown away by the gleefully brainless SPEED. Last month, I had the chance to screen an independent film called FUN, which involved two troubled teenagers who form an intense friendship which leads to murder. It was not a great film, but good enough that I wondered if my evaluation of HEAVENLY CREATURES might be influenced. But where FUN was occasionally stagy and ponderous, HEAVENLY CREATURES is dazzling, a perversely original psychodrama.
HEAVENLY CREATURES opens in 1952 in Christchurch, New Zealand, where 14-year-old Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) is a student at an all-girl parochial school. Sullen and withdrawn, Pauline finds a surprising soul-mate in Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), a vibrant and imaginative English girl newly arrived with her academic father (Clive Merrison) and socialite mother (Diana Kent). The two become inseparable friends, creating tales together of a fantastic "fourth world" called Borovnia. Gradually, however, Juliet's father and Pauline's mother (Sarah Peirse) begin to believe that the two girls have formed an "unwholesome attachment." As the families begin efforts to keep the girls apart, they retreat even deeper into their fantasy world, and hatch a plan to be together forever, a plan which involves killing Pauline's mother.
The strongest elements in FUN were the performances of the two young lead actresses, and ironically the same elements provide the only minor weak link in HEAVENLY CREATURES. Melanie Lynskey is the better of the two, playing the more complicated character, but it seems she settles into expressing every emotion by glowering beneath her nest of unruly dark curls; Kate Winslet is occasionally a bit much, arching her eyebrows and punching her oh-so-proper upper crust diction. However, their scenes together are quite effective, and they show a natural rapport. Lynskey in particular comes alive beautifully, and the intensity of their relationship never seems implausible.
It is also illustrated with astonishing creativity by Peter Jackson, best known for the marvelously demented DEAD ALIVE. HEAVENLY CREATURES begins with a sequence in which the girls, covered with blood, run screaming through the underbrush, intercut with dream-like black and white footage of the girls on a cruise ship. From the first frames, Jackson slams us into a world of chaos and delusion, and even through light-hearted scenes there is a sense of foreboding as we await the inevitable conclusion. This is the real triumph of HEAVENLY CREATURES: although it is alternately a drama, a fantasy and a mystery, it is an absolutely coherent whole. Because we know where this relationship will lead, there is an undercurrent of menace in dark-humored sequences where Pauline visualizes revenge fantasies. It also presents the disturbing premise that given the right (or wrong) circumstances, the fantasy world every adolescent creates could explode into the real world.
Those circumstances involve a delicate issue, one also raised by FUN. Since there is a sexual element to the relationship between Pauline and Juliet, it would be possible to misinterpret the film as suggesting that their crime, Leopold and Loeb-like, was just another manifestation of their "deviance." But Jackson is up to something more subtle than that. A key scene involving Pauline's encounter with a psychologist, and the doctor's subsequent ominous pronouncement of the word "homosexuality" to her mother, points out that while nothing the girls were doing was truly harmful, it was treated as such. In a case of power of suggestion, the girls begin to believe that they are mentally ill because that is the way their behavior is defined by society. Through both his audacious direction and an insightful script, Peter Jackson has crafted a powerful character study that is unlike anything you'll see this year.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Borovnians: 9.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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