I haven’t seen Heavenly Creatures for ages and I forgot how much Juliet was like this girl, full of cheerful fantasies she gives to Pauline, who’s so enraptured with Juliet she joins in on the fantasy. Juliet’s certain too her novel will be published so Pauline gets caught up in her own writing, and her poem is absolutely stunning.
I’m not a Peter Jackson fan as such, but I considered this my favourite film of his. I forgot how theatrical Winslet is besides Pauline’s churlish silence. It’s such a chaotic film, his camera work is frenetic, his sets have a lot of intricate detail, the sepia tones reminiscent of old photos. Everything’s operatic and sweeping and romantic, almost in a maniacal sense. You get a lot of Bridge to Terabithia vibes, by the Lovely Bones he had more money to create this fantastic worlds the girls basically hallucinate, if you want an actual folie a duex, it’s this story. It’s a tragedy with some comedy, basically the girls use dissociation and fantasy to escape their reality.
I also had nuns come to me in the religious hospital I was in (Mummy and Daddy would never put me in the poor’s hospital). Jackson’s penchant for dealing with pantomime horror and gore is also put to good use, someone else could’ve made a rather dull or twee representation of this true story. And people probably assume Titanic was Winslet’s first role, when it was this one. She really outshines everyone, and Melanie Lynskey doesn’t get enough props for how talented she is, she wasn’t just the sappy stalker neighbour she played in Two and A Half Men, she can perform nuanced accents really well, most people never knew she was from New Zealand. She’s great in Yellowjackets. But it feels like a repeat of Ghost World where Thora Birch was just a good an actress as ScarJo but by her own admission, wasn’t “pretty enough” or willing to be pretty enough to get the same roles ScarJo did. Winslet went on to win more movie roles, Lynskey stuck to independent films, but I haven’t detected her being bitter at all.
The clay people scenes stuck in my head as much as the very Lynchian moment the girls run at the camera screaming. I assume this is part of his imagination so it’s impressive he could be this creative with the story. He felt it was better to focus on their relationship rather than the trial regarding the murder. He’s pieced together such a believable fantasy realm full of romantic movie moments, Juliet sweeping down the stairs to Pauline like a movie heroine, shades of Gone with the Wind in the staging and music and soft lighting. I still find the clay people so off-putting but such an ingenious way to bring you into their world, their love scene is less graphic by translating it through this weird clay people orgy in the castle, and he gets away with lots of fake blood and body horror that he’s known for. Their obsession with film and Orson Wells is more immersive and bizarre, and again Jackson gets to play with horror and thriller tropes to include in this amazingly cohesive blend of movie genres.
I feel like the ageing makeup on the father is a bit over the top, I don’t know if he looked too young at the time. I like Juliet’s father comes off as the villain of the story, despite Jackson saying it was a murder story with no villain. However, Pauline and Juliet defend him more than anyone and he’s the most keen to split them up without them realising. This dichotomy is well explored. Her parents were absolute assholes, they lie they’re still together after privately divorced, which was a common occurrence at the time, you think the British are proper but it’s all a smokescreen to cover up their negative aspects. If they’d been alive now, society might’ve treated them better even if they’d had unhealthy thoughts. I have this thing about blaming Society in media whenever a character is conflicted or adversely affected by a social norm being forced on them, that if you removed the norm, they’d likely have avoided their misfortune. Putting it all in a diary isn’t a good idea obviously, but Pauline wasn’t planning on getting caught, most moiderers don’t.
Gay conversion therapy also features in the story. Pauline’s affections for Juliet are “unwholesome” and also reciprocated, so rather than have Juliet’s father “fix” Juliet, he decides Pauline’s parents should get her fixed instead, it must all be Pauline’s horrible influence. She’s mentally disturbed, essentially, but going through a phase she’ll grow out of it, but they can also “zap” it out of her when the technology becomes available. None of that will work. I don’t think they were necessarily unwell, just traumatised and desperate to escape their oppressive existences, the courts declared them sane but were less certain if homosexuality was at play given Pauline doesn’t admit same sex attraction to any other woman. And homosexuality was an illness, practically a comorbidity of insanity, or intrinsically linked. Using Pauline’s diary obviously excludes Juliet’s thoughts but there’s so much for Winslet to work with from Pauline’s account of her. Juliet’s letters are included.
Some people also need to take a lesson in when not to use any music at all. The murder scene is interlaced with the fantasy of them separated for good. You can only hear screams trapped in an empty void. No music, and the score is otherwise present and used for effect, but the lack of it gives the scene more weight and terror. Crash evidently abuses music for emotional effect to a manipulative degree, as do a lot of other movies.
The trial is then a footnote to the story, set to tragic music, the two were told to stay apart as a condition of their release, they were too young for the death penalty. But the separation condition wasn’t true, apparently. And Pauline has no individual Wikipedia page, bizarrely, Juliet does, she managed to go by a different name and get published and wasn’t found out to be a murderess until much later. I vaguely remember a documentary that brought the murder to my attention, and I’m always fascinated by romances that were broken apart by horrid circumstances. Sapphic yearning is a whole sub-genre of romantic and erotic fiction, you could have really exploited this aspect but Jackson’s respectful in his portrayal I just want to know the reaction people had to his clay people orgy scene. It obviously survived scripting, pre-production, production and pre-screening, and he’s kind of New Zealand’s answer to Jim Henson, having his own production company full of people who can come up with these costumes, it’s sort of his brand. I don’t want to see Meet the Feebles or any of his older films, but I remember seeing them in video stores as a kid before I realised Jackson was behind them, so when he was given Lord of the Rings, it felt worth pointing out his background. He’s been lauded for his practical filmmaking, I do appreciate Lord of the Rings from a film perspective I just don’t love them to sit through them multiple times. So this will remain my favourite film of his while I’m not inclined to explore any other film of his once or more than a couple of times. I was irritated by the Hobbit being three movies, which wasn’t his plan, we collectively know where the blame lies for that shit.
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