Heavenly Creatures: 1994, dir. Peter Jackson. Seen on DVD (March 14).
Heavenly Creatures is one of the most intense movies I’ve seen in a long time. It also has one of the most disturbing endings I’ve seen, period.
What I knew going into the film was that it was about two girls who are such close friends that they create their own world and wrap themselves in it, and then something terribly tragic happens at the end when they go too far. I couldn’t remember the details since it’s been such a long time since the movie was released.
The movie is based on a real-life situation, so if you know anything about the actual case, will this lessen the suspense of the film? I don’t think so, because you want to see how the two girls reach a point where they could do such a thing. The movie actually begins with the girls screaming hysterically, covered in blood, seeking help … and then flashes back a couple of years and the story begins.
Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey are the two friends, and both actresses are excellent. I was particularly taken with Lynskey, whom I’d only seen before as the sympathetic stepsister in Ever After. Since the writers had access to diaries written by Pauline, Lynskey’s character, the movie is primarily from her point of view.
And this is why the movie is so good—I sympathized with the leads, but when they start to consider a real-life murder, I realized what the outcome would be, what that tragedy that I vaguely remembered would probably be … they were going to kill Pauline’s mother. And I liked Pauline’s mother, she was the sort of character that Colleen Dewhurst used to play, and while I sympathized with the girls I kept hoping that something else would happen instead. Not this. Juliet’s mother was much more annoying, and the audience might have been more understanding if they’d picked her to destroy, but the filmmakers didn’t want to make it easy on us.
The murder scene is not beautifully filmed. It is not stylized. There’s no echoes of Coppola or Peckinpah here. It’s an ugly, brutal death, from the minute that Pauline raises the stocking with the half-brick in it. No delicate screams but rather guttural, animal noises from her mother. It’s bloody and dirty and incredibly realistic.
Throughout the film, the girls have imagined various people being killed, people whom they found oppressive or intrusive, but they always imagined very clean, quiet, bloodless deaths. They saw these people as clay figures like the ones they used in their daydreaming, clay that could be sliced in half with no muss or fuss. Murder was something out of a Fifties movie, brief and relatively painless. But once they attempt a real-life murder, they realize in horror that this is not a clay person, that this murder will not keep them from being separated, and that they have destroyed everything.
I saw Heavenly Creatures at night and I had to put on a very light, frothy movie after this one because I didn’t want any of it to invade my dreams.
I wish Peter Jackson would make more movies like this one instead of stylized epic films with lots of needless plummeting. This is a filmmaker who performs miracles with a small budget rather than a large one. He brings the girls’ invented world to life vividly and imaginatively.
And if you ever want evidence as to the stupidity and politics behind the Academy Awards, consider that Fran Walsh won her Oscar not for this screenplay, but for an overwrought song she wrote for The Return of the King. That’s a real shame. This is a beautifully written movie, gorgeous yet disturbing.
Like The Wild Bunch, I was sorry not to see this movie in a theater. I think it would have had an even greater effect on a larger screen. But Heavenly Creatures was plenty intense even on my little TV screen. I’m not sure I want to see it again, but then I’m not sure I need to see it again. Not anytime soon, anyway.
I’m glad you saw this and wrote about it. I really like Heavenly Creatures, saw it on cable a couple of years back, and for the longest time this was the only way I knew of Peter Jackson, isn’t that silly?
Some of the things I found so interesting — this movie was the debut for both girls in 1994, and Jackson selected them in part because of the accuracy of their accents, which play an enormous role in the minutiae of the social class distinctions in NZ and the UK. It was crucial to PJ that the local audiences believe that the actresses were of the social status of the characters. Isn’t that cool?
I thought the way PJ and Walsh handled the lesbianism was well-done also. There was a mass hysteria about this case when it occurred, and a backlash against homosexuality because it created murderers, dontchaknow, so the hot girl-on-girl action was necessary in the movie… but the activities that were alluded to in the diaries weren’t made as pruriently scandalous as PJ could have done, but instead woven well into the fantasy world of the clay people and the duo’s general dissociation, I thought.
AND! Because I can’t stop talking about this movie — did you know that a condition of the girls’ sentencing was that they were never allowed to see or speak to one another again in their lives? And, Juliet Hulme changed her name and became a famous novelist after moving to Britain? For real!
Yes, Juliet Hume became Anne Perry, the writer of historial whodunits. Irony.
I hated this movie. Yes, it was beautifully filmed, and yes, the actors were so convincing that you didn’t see the acting, but this movie offered me, the audience, no hope. I can watch forensic science shows on television for the same feelings I had at the end of this movie.
And yes, I am a Total Escapist. Thank you.